1) lfgxuvv ?

2) hst6t ?

I had a good one on Blogger the other day. All the characters appeared to be overlapping. I had no chance! I just hit submit and tried again...

Yea, agree with Tony, although the first letter in the Blogger captcha could be either "l" (lowercase L) or "I" (uppercase "i").

I don't think Blogger uses any uppercase letters in their captchas do they?

lfgxuvv and hst6t?

I dont think they ever have uppercase chars so I think the first letter is definitely an l. I think thats a problem for using all letters of alphabet and using numbers too...
The computer can easily differentiate between l, I, |, 1 but in some fonts it may be difficult. Then compound that with the warping of text and you may get fooled easily.

Correct Tony. It took me some seconds to realize the end must be a "v v" and not a "w". On the second captcha, I was pondering if it's an "n" or "h". Even though you often just wonder for a some seconds, that's a long time in usability, I would think. Maybe future generations will pity us web users of today for having had captchas...

Agreed. Although I've certainly seen much worse. It's great when they have really poor jpeg compression and mix upper and lower case too, just for good measure... I'll try to remember to screenshoot them in future!

If you want a challenge for a CAPTCHA then try this: -

http://www.imperialviolet.org/captcha.html

This guy is now a Googler but not the traditional googler (not your typical blogger) so you may or may not want to add his site to your list Philipp. I only read his site cos he used to go to my school and was mega-clever.

:)

Have you listened to some of the audio captchas on Blogger? Some of the letters/numbers are so ambiguous! I didn't know whether he was saying "i" or "five" or "nine" or something else altogether. The background noise is obviously there to stop automatic speech recognition but that was really bad!

i never fully understood what kind of technology could actually differentiate all these and submit some form?? could some guide me in the rigth direction so i would at least have an idea of what i'm against.

I agree, that captcha's at time are crayz.. .. at time I found that its easier to hit the Blogger wheelchair icon and get a number that I can feed .. when in doubt hot the wheelchair button and you will only get 3 numbers to type in :)-i

its easier ..workaround for blogger :captcha

1) Youcandoit!
2) Gotcha!

Had one yesterday at Yahoo Publisher I wish I had screen captured. There was a diagonal line that could have been a lowercase "L" or an uppercase "i", but it was neither! It turned out not to be a letter at all, it was just an added 'graphic element' to further obfuscate against OCR. Ridiculous.

I like Google's captchas because they are readable words, and not just gibberish. they are gibberish words, but they are pronounceable. I don't like digg too much, but the few times I have commented there it took me several tries to get it.

The worse in my opinion are Microsoft's which you can check here : https://accountservices.passport.net/reg.srf?id=2&sl=1&lc=1033

jon, there's PWNtcha (http://sam.zoy.org/pwntcha/) which can do quite a lot of different captcha images. I managed to write a program that was able to do fulyl automated sign ups to phpBB forums after only a days coding and its had a 87% success rate after only a little bit of testing and tweaking.

I'll add his blog to the Googler blogs, thanks.

Otsego, thanks so much.
could you say what language you did it in?

I have seen some on some people's personal blogs that get rid of the image thing. And instead say something like:

"Write my first name in the box to prove you are not a robot"

"Write any even number in the box"

"Write the value of two squared in the box"

etc.

I prefer this type of verification.

the only problem with that is that unless you change it every time, somebody can go through the page once manually, then set their robot to fill it in the same every time from then on.
What I think every image captcha should have is a button right next to it allowing you to refresh just the image in case you can't read it, but without refreshing the whole page and risking losing all your other input.