gfish: (Default)
gfish ([personal profile] gfish) wrote2006-07-28 01:56 pm

(no subject)

Seattle City Light has a nice opt-in green energy program. Which is cool and all, but look at the form at the bottom of the page. Particularly the hidden form variable autoCode2. Lamest captcha ever.

[identity profile] mathochist.livejournal.com 2006-07-28 09:20 pm (UTC)(link)
Call me dense, but... what about the form?

[identity profile] gfish.livejournal.com 2006-07-28 09:30 pm (UTC)(link)
The captcha at the end of it is in plain text. You can copy-and-paste it directly into the text field. Worse than that, it's set in a hidden form variable, which strongly implies that you could set it to be anything you want. Basically, it completely fails to provide any of the bot-protection that are the entire point of captchas. (Not that they actually work all that well at the best of times, but that's another issue.)

[identity profile] mathochist.livejournal.com 2006-07-28 11:38 pm (UTC)(link)
Ah, I didn't know the term. Yeah, that is lame.

[identity profile] xiadyn.livejournal.com 2006-07-28 10:04 pm (UTC)(link)
I think they're confused about the purpose of such things.

I like the ones I've seen lately that have you answer a question, like "what's my first name?" or "5 + 9 = _". I think this could have some entertaining variants like "what color is the sky?" (allow most primary and secondary colors) or maybe giving the answer to an easy puzzle.

[identity profile] gfish.livejournal.com 2006-07-28 10:12 pm (UTC)(link)
I think Schneier linked to one a few months ago that showed a 3x3 grid of images and told you to click on the one with a cute fuzzy animal. Interesting approach to the problem.

[identity profile] catamorphism.livejournal.com 2006-07-28 10:19 pm (UTC)(link)
Heh, that might be worthy of submission to The Daily WTF.

[identity profile] ashley-y.livejournal.com 2006-07-28 11:13 pm (UTC)(link)
That is bad. See PWNtcha (http://sam.zoy.org/pwntcha/) (NSFW) for some apparently better captchas that have been cracked.