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I don't understand why people like to say "Images had to be distorted otherwise they would be easily cracked". I'm talking about those verification images that we had to type to identify that we are humans.

Exactly what steps must we take to break even a simple image? like this: enter image description here

Ok so i'm guess we had to read all the bytes of the image and try to draw some sense out of those bytes? because if that's really how it is done it does seem really pretty tough (so what's with that comment that it's easily cracked), or is there a better way to crack images (that make it so easy after-all) ?

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If not distorted, using OCR it is quite easy.

By the way, there was a question on OCR yesterday (OCR - starting point) where I posted a link to Google's OCR tool. I also posted another link that may be interesting for you, in which they explain how the OCR tool treats words it cannot read, http://allspammedup.com/2011/01/google-recaptcha-cracked, excerpt:

"When a word in a book scan can’t be recognized by Google’s OCR software, it’s sent to the reCAPTCHA pool. So when a person enters a reCAPTCHA phrase into a form, Google can discover what its OCR program couldn’t, without having to hire human editors to review scanning results."

So: CAPTCHA --> OCR --> CAPTCHA. The circle is complete :-)

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    The problem with reCaptcha is that it is often obvious which of the two images is the known one - if your OCR is almost on par with reCaptcha's, you have a fairly good chance by solving the easy one and providing garbage for the other.
    – tdammers
    Commented Aug 18, 2011 at 19:08
  • You're right. Also, there are other problems with users with disabilities. The following article is interesting in that it shows differences between basic and advanced captchas in terms of accessibility: jimthatcher.com/captchas.htm
    – Jalayn
    Commented Aug 19, 2011 at 5:55

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