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DRM VS CAPTCHAs
master_kaos
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
People argue all the time for the big companies to stop implementing DRM since implementations are usually cracked fairly promptly, and the only people it hurts is the legit consumer (which I totally agree with).
Yet the same people that disagree with DRM, are in turn implementing CAPTCHAs into their websites that humans themselves can barely read.
Some sites have good captchas that I can read the letters/words perfectly fine, but lately I have been coming across sites where I cannot even make out 1/2 the letters -- they are extremely small, have a million dots/lines/other random crap that covers a good portion of the letters.
This one site I came across it literally took me 20 times until I got it.
People are cracking captchas all the time, so others are developing even "better" ones, and the cycle continues. Who ends up getting screwed? The legit people who are just trying to make a post but can't make out 6pt font letters with 50 lines going through it.
What is everyone elses take?
Yet the same people that disagree with DRM, are in turn implementing CAPTCHAs into their websites that humans themselves can barely read.
Some sites have good captchas that I can read the letters/words perfectly fine, but lately I have been coming across sites where I cannot even make out 1/2 the letters -- they are extremely small, have a million dots/lines/other random crap that covers a good portion of the letters.
This one site I came across it literally took me 20 times until I got it.
People are cracking captchas all the time, so others are developing even "better" ones, and the cycle continues. Who ends up getting screwed? The legit people who are just trying to make a post but can't make out 6pt font letters with 50 lines going through it.
What is everyone elses take?
master_kaos on
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One of those "type out the letters you see in this warped and distorted pictures so we know you're not a malicious piece of computer software, or at least if you are you're a really clever one" things.
A Completely Automated Personal Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart, apparently.
Puzzle League: 073119-160185
Then I can say -- I had to use this very forum's CAPTCHA recently, and it was pretty obnoxious. I'd generally fail once or twice before I got it right. That said, it's still better than spammers.
If there's any real greater issue here, it's "fuck those spamming assholes" as far as I can see.
It's the same as the relation between padlocks and literacy tests.
Which is to say... I have no fucking idea what he's on about either.
Plus the issue is more in what you're being restricted from doing. With a CAPTCHA you basically just don't get to enjoy the priveledge of posting somewhere or an equally trivial thing. It isn't very common that it's preventing you from doing anything all that important. DRM's, on the other hand, are essentially destroying the possibility for interoperability, and screwing over the customer for buying something online rather than getting a CD. CAPTCHA's can be annoying, but DRM's are downright despicable.
But when you start throwing lines, obstructions, different colors etc is where they can fuck off. I can't see all that shit!
That having the 1000 spammers in the world that bother to crack them is better than having the 50,000,000 in the world that don't?
DRM = A nuisance to consumers who just want to be able to listen to their MP3s on a few different devices, but doesn't really stop people who actually want to steal the content.
CAPTCHAs= A nuisance to a visitor of a forum who just wants to make a quick post, but doesn't really stop the aggressive spammers who want to spam their products.
I mean it isn't quite the same thing, due to the fact that captchas do stop some of the basic script kiddies.
And I have no problem with them if they are EASILY readable. The issue is the fact that some of them now are almost impossible to make out.
I'm not agreeing with the OP, I was just saying how I thought the OP thought the two were related.
Can we flog him for a silly dichotomy then?
If only we could make Poll Threads!!
So, at least you're forcing the spammers to spend more money in order to get onto the forums, not to mention the fact that the vast, vast majority of spammers are bots. So, whereas anti-piracy measures make it a major pain in the ass for 20% of legitimate users, and are quickly worked-around by 80% of software pirates, CAPTCHAs are a minor pain in the ass for 100% of legitimate users, and totally shut down 99% of spammers. And I'll bet if you asked most users which was worse, having to go through a CAPTCHA system once, or having to deal with spammers constantly, they're going to want the CAPTCHA.
You can have fully-functional software without anti-piracy measures; you can't have a fully-functional forum without a CAPTCHA system.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
To elaborate on this: spammers go "here's some free porn if you tell us what these letters are!"
The letters are yoinked from wherever they want to spam.
Fixed.
Put me in the "they're totally worth it" camp.
If you ever need to talk to someone, feel free to message me. Yes, that includes you.
Meh, all those do is cut your spam by 2/3.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
1/(3 C 9) != 1/3.
Who's brilliant idea was it to toss in diagonal (that took like 30 tries to get spelled right) lines in a CAPTCHA with an O? Thanks, assholes.
But in all seriousness, is it really too much to ask that you make it a Jpeg or something? Making it a colorblind test is not fun. Especially not when you have dashes all over it with Os and 0s, and K/k, P/p, and O/o as case sensitive.
But I prefer these to DRMs.
I'll take "eye-burning, annoying, minor deterrence to post, view, or otherwise participate" over "legally protected virus" any day of the week, to be honest.
A comic voting site does that. It'll have a character from one of their hosted comics, with their name on the edge in readable font, and "Which character is in the picture above?"
Then the three options. This is what we should lean towards. It's easy to see for humans, nearly impossible for a computer(unless it has an infinite trial and error sequence and can waste all day testing a characters name from a webcomic hosted on the site), it'll keep it out for a while. And being randomly generated always cuts down on possibly finding it eventually. There's no guarantee a dice roll will ever feasibly get the right number if it's constantly randomized with each INCORRECT roll.
These are the CAPTCHA systems that are truly flawed – accessibility to humans is important, and similar glyphs really don't help. Now, logic problems or tests built on thematic knowledge have certain advantages. Still vulnerable to brute force, though.
Technically, this remains vulnerable to the great flaw of CAPTCHA systems, namely that a high-traffic site under the control of a nefarious individual (and pornography is apparently a major source of this) can simply pipe the data elsewhere and ask someone else to solve it.
Similarly, such a design, if widely adopted, would require a defence against current OCR technology – which suggests that it could quickly deteriorate into being very similar to current CAPTCHAs.
As a note, using a random selection never guarantees that you will reach the correct result.
For an interesting comment on the whole thing, see the claim that "you cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem." (Edwards' Law)
There are limits to this, of course, but there's a point there.
Yeah, you're right. I wasn't thinking.
I actually did the math once and figured that it still wasn't worth it.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
...Completley Automated Personal Turing to tell Computers and Humans Apart. Something about that is incredibly ironic to my ears.
[edit] More like CAPTCHA that.