Opinion: Access denied

Posted on 12 Oct 2009 at 11:12

Google seems to be on a mission to deliberately alienate its users with its ludicrously hard CAPTCHA system.

The idea is that you type in the hard-to-see words to prove that you're a human, rather than some kind of evil spamming robot sent to create billions of free accounts.

Fair enough, we all hate spammers. Only spammers are rarely cleverly programmed robots designed to create free accounts automatically. Usually, they're a room full of people in a third-world country hired by the real spammer to create thousands of fake accounts by typing in the correct answer to the CAPTCHA.

Google seems to have cottoned on to this with its nigh-on-impossible-to-read CAPTCHA system, which does an incredibly good job of keeping robots and normal people out of its systems. You'd best not have a visual impairment or you'll be in real trouble.

You see, Google's also implemented a kind of audio capture, so those people that can't see the screen properly can have a series of numbers read out that they then type in. Seems simple enough, but that would be too easy and you never know when there's a voice-to-text spamming robot around (speech recognition software in Google's world must be a million miles better than it is in the real world).

So, to make audio CAPTCHA immune to this kind of attack, the track has been obscured. By obscured, I mean that some sadistic mumbling robot that appears to be phoning in the CAPTCHA test from an incredibly loud party full of other sadistic mumbling robots mechanically blurts out some unintelligible numbers (well, I assume they're numbers, although sounds would be more accurate).

Once it's done, a strange Mexican-sounding man says "one second" or "once again" or something. Then the whole process starts again. Surely there's got to be a better way.

Author: David Ludlow

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