That girl was always falling again and again

[venta]

I've noticed, of late, that I've been getting worse at filling in captchas correctly. I think that they're getting worse, and harder to read - but possibly this is just the equivalent of declaring as you get older than all your friends have started mumbling.

This was today's particularly troublesome specimen:



Is it just me, or is the second word hard to read, and the last letter just a splodge?

Is captcha-reading software getting better, forcing captchas to become ever more illegible?

Or am I, in fact, slowly devolving into a spam bot?

Comments

[lnr]

I'd go for "glorified" for the second word, even though that last letter is a splodge. I find that these ones in particular are often very hard to read, and irritatingly don't always seem to use real words, which makes it much harder. I've no idea at all if your "saltord" is correct, that l could be an i or even and r for all I can tell.

I think the reCAPTCHA ones are particularly bad for this, as they're apparently deliberately using words that already failed OCR - harder for bots yes, but there doesn't seem to have been any thought into *why* they failed, and the fact that some of them are just impossible out of context.

[venta.livejournal.com]

"Glorified", y'say?

Y'see, I was under the impression that captchas usually used non-words, so automatically ruled out anything which was, like, actually a word :(

[d-floorlandmine.livejournal.com]

Not if they're reCaptcha ones ... those use (as I think someone else has mentioned) words from scanned books which have failed OCR. The first word is a known test value, the second one is using the humans as a distributed intuitive OCR system.