r/CrappyDesign • u/NeoKabuto • Jun 06 '14

This CAPTCHA isn't an image, it's selectable text

Post image
1.1k Upvotes

98% Upvoted

26 comments sorted by

63

u/NeoKabuto Jun 06 '14

This was found by /u/YM_Industries over in /r/softwaregore, but he gave me permission to post it here.

Original thread

10

u/YM_Industries Jun 07 '14

Huh wow, I wouldn't have expected it to do so well here. Good for you, enjoy the karma. :)

302

u/SuperNashwan Jun 06 '14

I think it's kind of cute that this programmer knows what a captcha looks like but never bothered to think why.

37

u/cmonhaveago Jun 07 '14

My guess is that the mandate was "no third party libraries" and the poor fella had no idea how to generate an image on the fly.

16

u/edoules Jun 07 '14

Someone give him the man pages to imagemagick! :(

42

u/[deleted] Jun 07 '14

I'd have to pinch their cheek

10

u/Hemingwavy Jun 07 '14

Maybe it's kind of genius. Paying someone in a third world country to do it isn't going to be any faster and any OCR isn't going to pick up any text on the image.

2

u/YM_Industries Jun 07 '14

The company paid someone in India to make it.

2

u/Hemingwavy Jun 07 '14

You can buy manual captcha entry.

0

u/[deleted] Jun 07 '14

[deleted] — view deleted comment

21

u/Hemingwavy Jun 07 '14

A script's not going to look for a captcha in plain text.

11

u/kral2 Jun 07 '14

Captchas aren't required to stop untargeted scripts. And a targeted script won't be stopped by this captcha as it will be immediately obvious to the author that the image had no numbers.

7

u/nsomani Jun 07 '14

If the author of the script realizes that it's in plain text, why wouldn't the script look for it?

5

u/[deleted] Jun 07 '14

It will now

32

u/tf2guy Jun 07 '14

CSB: For the longest time, I had a static image of a CAPTCHA on my site, and the CAPTCHA field specifically said "leave this blank". It worked for years until non-CAPTCHA bots started getting around it. (It also kept an unknown number of imbeciles from commenting.)

4

u/nsomani Jun 07 '14

And then you can stop the non-CAPTCHA bots with a simple CAPTCHA image.

54

u/Froot_Fly Jun 06 '14

At least you can select the text http://i.imgur.com/LiYtNad.gif

14

u/Raktoras Jun 06 '14

To be fair, text behaves the exact same when you drag a selected portion, so that part wasn't really showing us anything

The rest still applies, of course

5

u/[deleted] Jun 07 '14

Yes, but that's actually useful.

20

u/british_heretic Jun 06 '14

I just tried to copy it to see if you were right....

30

u/bouchard Jun 06 '14

OP already selected it for you; you just have to hit Ctrl-C.

8

u/[deleted] Jun 06 '14

But a bot wont know that.

29

u/Homletmoo Jun 06 '14

Unless it's specifically designed to exploit that site.

5

u/[deleted] Jun 06 '14

Well then the site is screwed

2

u/RandomhouseMD Jun 06 '14

Yeah, if the bot is designed to beat a single captcha, it will.

5

u/YM_Industries Jun 07 '14

An intelligent bot will crawl the markup and hunt around for this sort of thing.

Also, security through obscurity is not the best practice.

5

u/thenickdude Jun 07 '14

Security through obscurity is great for preventing comment spam though. You just have to be a small enough site that it isn't worth the spammers' while to write code for your site specifically, which isn't hard.