Attached to a Captcha

2008 June 4

While CAPTCHA’s are supposed to keep the evil spammers of the world at bay there is no doubt that they are an annoyance to the end user. Most involve deciphering a string of mangled characters in an image which you must get right before you can complete a transaction of some sort (e.g. for signing up to an email service or posting on a forum).

Theoretically only humans can correctly identify the characters and hence proceed but in recent years many variations have been allegedly defeated by advanced optical character recognition software (check out this Chinese website which tells you how difficult each type is to crack and how much it costs to do so). It seems to have turned into a game of cat an mouse between the hackers and those trying to stop them with ever more elaborate variations. A friend of mine discovered this one today when trying to download something from RapidShare -

What on earth is “only enter symbols attached to a cat” supposed to mean??!! Am I lacking optical cat recognition abilities? For the life of me I can’t see any cats in there (let alone attached ones)! After multiple failed attempts it turned out that the answer to this one was DTEC. It seems we have a problem.

As it turns out, this isn’t the only crazy CAPTCHA out there and whilst captcha is a “good enough” solution in most cases there has to be a better solution to this madness, even if it’s just to improve the usability of the current system. Any takers?

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23 Responses leave one →
  1. 2008 June 4

    It turns out that there are dogs in the lineup too. It's hard to tell the difference!

  2. 2008 June 4
    Typhoon permalink

    I takes me like 5 tries to do these f'in things . why do most people upload to Rapidshit instead of stuff like Mediafire or Sendspace!?

  3. 2008 June 4

    I can just about make a dog in the 1 (or I) if I squint really hard but I can't see any cats!

    You have to wonder if they actually want people using their service or is this just a poor ploy to get people to sign up to their premium product?

    P.s. I'd recommend http://filemail.com/ for sending large files.

  4. 2008 June 6
    Travis permalink

    The trick is to look at their heads, if they have cat heads, it's it. For me it's always been number letter number letter if thats any help. And i didn't click the download button, i pressed enter in the box where you type the code in, and it worked.

    Good luck

  5. 2008 June 6
    Werner permalink

    Oh my goodness! That was the most RETARDED thing I have ever done in my life. Took me about 30 tries, and a message that even told me I had gotten enough wrong that I had to wait 10 minutes more to try again.

    Wow. Thanks for screwing your company over RapidShare, I no longer like you guys.

    *thumbs down*

  6. 2008 June 8
    rpdshre_suks permalink

    wow…i got the most easiest one after 8 tries…http://rs263.rapidshare.com/access462308.jpg

    it is WHKG =p that wuz hard

  7. 2008 June 9
    Michael permalink

    “Premium Users do not have to enter codes.” – This says it all, they're trying to frustrate us into subscribing.

  8. 2008 June 9
    lolol permalink

    Lol this is the stupidest thing I've ever seen. It's only meant to spoof bots, and this is probably the stupidest way I have seen that done on the entire internet.

    Congrats Rapidshare for making yourselves look like the biggest idiots on the net.

  9. 2008 June 9
    lolol permalink

    By the way, pressing enter instead of clicking download seems to be the best way to make it work.

  10. 2008 June 10
    stupidme permalink

    I can't recognize if it is a cat or a mouse or a dog …. I need a magnified glass…..

  11. 2008 June 11

    Tried repeatedly using all caps, thinking that would make a difference. Turns out it does make a difference! It does not work – use lower case only! (And the sequence is not always-number-letter-number-letter).

    Very frustrating to say the least :P

  12. 2008 June 12
    Tom permalink

    I see dog, dog, duck, crocodile, fish, whale.

  13. 2008 June 12
    Vamp permalink

    I got mine at first try, but I couldn't realy quite make it out, I had to save the picture, open it and zoom-in in order to tell cats and dogs apart, and even then, I have to say I was lucky to get it right!

    The major difference is that the cats are the somewhat 'fatter' picture.

  14. 2008 June 12
    ritz permalink

    i guess some bloody looser in Rapidshare thought it is a great idea and lets implement it and be famous … ass***le did he ever tried it himself … how painful it is for users to get it correct?

    I tried magnifying the image and still after 100 of tries it shows me wrong …

    have they ever themselves seen a dog and cat?
    Stop wasting our time … I guess we should all boycott them and use another file upload space…

    Thanks for nothing rapidshare team !

  15. 2008 June 12

    Why would you even consider visiting rapidshare when you have Filemail.com??

  16. 2008 June 12

    Seriously, thought i was retarded.. when i couldnt do this…

    UNNECESSARILY DIFFICULT.. have no idea why they would do this..

  17. 2008 June 14
    rapidhate permalink

    @john: because certain people have problems in being addicted off of rapidshare

    ok, after like 50 something tries, the trick is to see which ones are sitting and which are standing. the standing ones are the dogs, the sitting ones are the cats

    seriously, rapidshare people are being such [edit]! at least they should find something HUMANS can be able to do…

  18. 2008 June 17
    Lenka permalink

    I got almost insane with such stupidity but here are suggestions which work:
    1) never press download, but press ENTER in code area
    2) look at the heads, cats have them roundish, dogs just wide
    3) cats are rounder than dogs, cats are bigger than dogs

    good luck with this stupidity

  19. 2008 June 19
    RapidShare Sucks permalink

    FYI try the letters where the animal its sitting and like Lenka said never click on download, just press Enter. Have fun!

  20. 2008 June 21

    Rapidshare sucks and lenka are right… but it remains difficult!

    another good service is fast-load.net! Up to 250 mb per file, as fast (even faster sometimes) than rapidshare and no limits for downloading! you can even earn money :p

  21. 2008 June 23
    Kudafi permalink

    The only thing I can say is “Rapidshare we are not fortune tellers!” =)

  22. 2008 June 24

    This is pure genius because… guess what… they want you to sign up for a premium account by annoying the hell out of you

  23. 2008 July 4

    Rapidshare's pussy cat captcha was a history now (they have abandoned it after failed test) and a good example for usability horrors.

    And there are still good captcha breaker's out there and first class spammer xrumer ( http://www.botmaster.net/more1/ ) has a good captcha breaker.

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