Apathy Sketchpad

This page will teach you how to write a not-necessarily-very-good programme to beat some common captchas, but it will not provide any useful code to do so for you. It should give you an idea how to go about defeating captchas not listed here. But mostly, I hope it will be instructive for anyone who wants to write a less easily defeated captcha in the future, since apparently you’re all hopeless at it at the moment.

As everyone in the world knows by now, most websites and forums use “captchas” to try and stop computer programmes from posting fake comments containing adverts. “Captcha” stands for “Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart”. And as everyone in the world ought to have realised by now, they don’t work.

There exist a number of ways around them, the most cunning and most effective, although the most difficult to set up, is to build a pornographic website and get real humans to solve the captchas for you in exchange for naked pictures.

But mostly, they’re easy to get around because they’re shit. This, for example, is the default captcha that comes with the now obsolete phpbb2:

That is very easy to solve. (It should perhaps be pointed out at this stage that my job is in large part to extract shy information from images.) As with all the algorithms I’ll show you, this is the first and simplest one I could come up with, and it’s only the start. In all cases I will extract a binary mask of the letters for transferal to a more general OCR system. Also in all cases, I will use Matlab 6 to perform the analysis. Read the rest of this entry »

Is it just me, or is there something important missing from this article?

Seems to me a bit like reporting that there’s a common foodstuff that contains toxic dye but not saying which one.

See, I really didn’t intend for Religious Crackpot Of The Month to be a regular thing. I thought, I’ll just do it once, and call it “of the month” anyway. But then, the new month rolls over, and almost immediately a perfect Crackpot sends a long and brilliantly angry email to Pharyngula, one of my new favourite blogs. I’m not going to go through and address each claim individually, as that would just be tragic, but let me just show you one or two of the best bits. You should read the rest yourself, because it’s more or less solid insane gold from start to finish.

I mean, a lot of it is just gibberish. Have a look at this, for example. I’ve found that if I turn my mind on its side and think in just the right way (and not to hard) then I can get this to sound like semi-reasonable logic (try it; it soon passes):

16. DNA of humans differ/vary by about 10-12% from each other. 50% of human DNA is identical to the DNA of a banana. Humans and apes have no common ancestor.

You have to get yourself into a frame of mind where individual words and what a sentence sounds like are more important than the actual concepts being discussed, and then you have to repeat the phrase “if human DNA is so similar to a banana’s, we shouldn’t be surprised if it’s similar to an ape’s” over and over until it sounds like it makes sense. And this is just ingenious:

18. There is no real vestigial/useless organ. There is no junk DNA. Note: Males’ nipples “arouse” women.

It particularly entertained me when I read this:

29. Atheism or evolution does not provide a solid foundation for morality. If there is no God, there is no good nor evil.

Because, yeah, it’s true. But then, the Bible doesn’t tell me what football team to support, so I guess that’s not true either. But this is my favourite one of his arguments, by some way:

11. The Earth is not millions of years old. Notes: Magnetic field decay; Archaeology; History, other “Time limiters.” Ancient people were as smart as modern men. Evolutionists have no excuse.

DNA cannot exist in natural environments longer than 10,000 years; yet, DNA have been FOUND in Neanderthal bones, insects in amber, Dinosaur fossils, etc. A dinosaur fossil was discovered still having soft tissue and blood cells.

DNA in amber? This Crackpot thinks Jurrasic Park is a documentary!

Well, okay, so fragments of DNA have been found in amber. Fragments. Small little strings of genes which scientists aren’t at all sure are preserved ‘as-was’. That’s hardly at odds with the fact that DNA decays over time, is it?

26. Evolution is science fiction (a myth). It is similar to the story of the Centaurs (horse-men) and Mermaids (fish-women). I don’t believe in Centaurs and Mermaids.

No, but you do believe in Jurrasic Park. It’s not fair. I want to get emails like this. Maybe I should write one of those suddenly fashionable atheist books.

Lastly, I leave you with one of the postscripts from the above email:

Notes for Jews:

Your Messiah (Saviour) has arrived over 2,000 years ago: He is the Son of God who became a man (while still being God), suffered and died on the cross, and lived again from the dead; was prophesied in Isaiah 53, and in the book of Daniel.

Water is not great at dissolving coffee. Whenever I have coffee, the coffee appears to come out of solution and into suspension as the drink progresses, and then it sinks, so that the last mouthful is too strong. Maybe some people like it this way. Me, I don’t. I end up with a bitter aftertaste. I then want a quick mouthful of cola or juice or water or something to take this away. Even if I have really good coffee that dissolves really well, I still don’t much care for the aftertaste.

Now it seems to me that there is an awful lot of coffee sold these days in increasingly many ways. You can have it with cholocate, which I understand is called a ‘mocha’, and that’s great. Or you can have it squeezed into a single shot and call it an ‘espresso’. Or you can prefix almost any combination of syllables to ‘-ppucino’ and end up with some other variant of the stuff (except ‘al-’, when you end up with an actor, although I’ve little doubt that somewhere in America you can buy a coffee called an ‘alpucino’). But I’ve never seen a coffee that has a little something with it to take away the aftertaste. It’d have to be a liquid, because solids just don’t cut it, so the little biscuits are out. And what use is cream on top of the coffee? Surely it should be underneath it? I suppose I could use a straw and drink from the bottom, but that would seem strange.

I’d have thought someone in the huge and competitive coffee industry would have cracked this problem by now. I assume that since I don’t tend to drink much of the stuff, I’ve just missed it.

So could someone tell me what it is, please?