Google's reCAPTCHA briefly cracked

I always assumed that when given the option to hear the CAPTCHA it was going to just read me the muddled words I see. Using just 58 different spoken words doesn't seem anywhere near as secure as the text images... which I guess is why it was cracked.

I find it always amusing that stuff gets "cracked for a moment". You know, as if the vulnerability wasn't there before, then popped up and boom fixed!<p>No. The reality is: the vulnerability has been <i>public</i> for a brief moment. And that's true for all the software in the world. Sometimes really good exploits stay secret for years and years. Sometimes (often?) they get fixed by a side effect before even going public, after a year or two.<p>So not. You're not secure.

Very impressive stuff. For what it's worth, I played around with the new audio reCAPTCHA a bit.<p><pre><code> - I heard 50+ distinct words, plus the numbers 1-9 - Numbers are not written out anymore (e.g. "nine" does not work, it must be "9") - You must get 9 out of 10 words correct to complete the CAPTCHA </code></pre> So they're still working with a very small dictionary of words, and with a little practice it's not hard to nail these consistently (as a human). The extra noise makes it a little more difficult to split the samples, but that's a solvable problem. I bet they can re-break it with their existing program and not too much additional effort to retrain the system.

This is just another example that image CAPTCHA's are a weak spam deterrent and they are great example of dark UI patterns.<p>The benefits of using this kind of system are shrouded in the user's cost.

What happens if you train a neural network too much?

I think it's impressive that an algorithm can crack the CAPTCHAs. I get them wrong most of the time.