[NFBCS] Automatic Captcha solving

[Joseph C. Lininger]

You're right, I misspoke. Given that I work in an area of the CS field 
that does some of this kind of thing, it was kind of a major instance of 
misspeaking too, and I should have been more careful. My apologies.

When I said "isn't going to happen", what I really meant is that the 
industry isn't going to keep using a solution that can be solved using 
OCR or other automation techniques. That has historically been a hard 
problem, so it hasn't really been a major issue. You are correct in 
pointing out that this is not necessarily the case now though, which 
probably means they'll be changing the technology again. We're already 
seeing signs of that happening. The changes could be something as simple 
as doing something to the text to make it harder to recognize, or it 
could be something as major as redesigning how the system works in its 
entirety.

A somewhat recent innovation is to have the "I'm not a robot" checkbox, 
but not present a captcha if the system determines the entity on the 
other end is most likely human. Delays between key presses, browsing 
history, etc. Not sure of *all* of the factors. That system will present 
a captcha if it isn't pretty sure the entity is human though, so 
accessibility of the captcha is still important.
Joe

On 3/29/2021 2:46 PM, Jonesy Cee wrote:
> You act like what I am saying is theoretical.  saying that it won’t happen is just simply not true. ..
>
> Do a search yourself by googling, “github solve captcha OCR” and you will find many, many different things such as what our first provided in the original email. I wasn’t asking what a captcha is for the purpose, I was asking if anyone has used an automated extension, script or app that solves them such as the one initially provided.
>
>> On Mar 29, 2021, at 2:35 PM, Joseph C. Lininger via NFBCS <nfbcs at nfbnet.org> wrote:
>>
>> Hi Curtis,
>> I know you already know the answer to your rhetorical question, but I am going to answer it anyway for those who don't understand why using OCR to solve captchas isn't going to happen.
>>
>> The entire point of a captcha is to prevent automated systems from interacting with a page. If OCR or any other automated technology could be used to solve the captcha, there would be no point in using one. If a blind person could use OCR to solve it, so could any other automated system incorporating OCR technology. The same thing goes for any other automated solution one might come up with for the solution of captchas. In fact, captchas are specifically designed to be hard to solve by automated means. For example, the ones that require you to enter a code you see on the screen have the code blurred, in funny fonts, or otherwise obscured in a way that makes it hard for automated systems to recognize the characters. Most captchas today do have an audio option that you can use as an alternative to the visual captcha. You might argue that this is harder than just using an automated solution, and you're right, it is. That's the point though; the captcha is designed to explicitly require human interaction in order to proceed.
>> Joe
>>
>>> On 3/29/2021 1:42 PM, Curtis Chong via NFBCS wrote:
>>> Hello:
>>>
>>> If OCR can crack a CAPTCHA, doesn't this kind of defeat the purpose of the
>>> CAPTCHA?
>>>
>>> Cordially,
>>>
>>> Curtis Chong
>>>
>>> -----Original Message-----
>>> From: NFBCS <nfbcs-bounces at nfbnet.org> On Behalf Of Jonesy Cee via NFBCS
>>> Sent: Monday, March 29, 2021 10:58 AM
>>> To: NFBCS at nfbnet.org
>>> Cc: Jonesy Cee <jones.cee7 at yahoo.com>
>>> Subject: [NFBCS] Automatic Captcha solving
>>>
>>> Has anyone had luck with using a screen reader such as orca and implementing
>>> a script, plug-in or application to automatically solve captchas using OCR
>>> or Voice recognition? Here is an example of what I am talking about,
>>> although I would really like to find an option that works purely with
>>> optical character recognition (OCR).
>>>
>>> https://github.com/dessant/buster
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