OK so it’s confirmed : captcha is no longer a foolproof method to avoid spammers.
Although not all captchas can be circumvented with software, many does.
Thanks to Sam who has informed us that this is the case.
btw; regarding complaints that captcha is alienating disabled visitors, there’s a workaround – provide a link which will play an audio, which tells the alphabets in the captcha. However, this is not very easy to implement indeed at the moment.
basbang 🙂 and there is an even surer way to break captcha, simply reuse the captcha in another (popular) site. no need for complicated captcha breaking algorithm.
audio will do, though i prefer text based question. “what’s 5+5?” “what’s the next alphabet after ‘f’?”, etc
#1 – The significance of Sam’s project is that one no longer need human to break the captcha. Previously, to break captcha, you need to develop the whole website to break the captcha (as you mentioned in your comment).
This might be the reason why my (and others) blog was safe from spammers, even though you can break captcha with that method – it’s not very feasible for an Internet-wide spamming operation yet.
Now, you just run the software, and that’s it.
Now, we’re finally talking about large scale spamming operation, because the captcha can be defeated purely by the machine with no human assistance.