I hate spammers as much as anyone. Maybe more, since I have to deal with them as a blogger, too.
LinkedIn isn’t a spammer site, but I do get emails every now and again from someone asking me to join their network there. I signed up for LinkedIn ages ago but never use it since I 1) don’t plan on applying for a job soon, or ever; b) don’t plan on hiring anyone any time soon, or ever; and γ) find most networking sites irritating.
So anyway, I got an email notifying me of LinkedIn join request, prompting me to go to the site and redo my settings to stop getting emails. I logged in, and it put up a Captcha screen: one of those forms where you have to type in displayed words to prove you’re not a robot.
I have no issue with this… usually. But here is what LinkedIn wanted me to do:
Riiiight. Now let’s see, where’s my π key?
So, lacking a Greek keyboard* I’ve decided to let things stand as they are. I can delete emails as they come in, I suppose, and in fact that almost makes it seem like I’m getting something done (Look! My inbox went from 315 to 314! Woohoo!). And if I ever find myself in Greece and need to log in, I’ll just borrow someone else’s keyboard.
Opa!
*When I tried to use the audio option, it started reciting numbers at me. Um, thanks?
August 20th, 2010 at 2:05 pm
Why not hit that reload button, above the audio playback button, and try a new (and probably non-Greek) image?
August 20th, 2010 at 2:06 pm
What happened when you clicked on the top blue icon (above the audio option)? The alternate text was in … Urdu?
August 20th, 2010 at 2:09 pm
In defense of LinkedIn, they appear to be using the same captcha service that many others do – reCaptcha. Their images are pulled straight from book scans and not only provide captcha but also help to advance the state-of-the-art in optical character recognition. It looks like you just got a bad token
Probably reloading the page would have been a good option.
August 20th, 2010 at 2:12 pm
Since it’s a recaptcha, only one of the two words is actually known, the other one is using your eyes for OCR. I think it’s pretty clear which one is which here. So if you just typed in “GREEK strakir”, you’d pass.
August 20th, 2010 at 2:20 pm
Phil,
FYI, there’s a ‘refresh’ button (the top blue button to the right of the sample words) that allows you to cycle through captcha choices until you see something that you’re comfortably confident in being able to reproduce in type .
August 20th, 2010 at 2:22 pm
Phil…if you didn’t know where your π key was, how did you manage to type “where’s my π key”?
August 20th, 2010 at 2:24 pm
Well, if he had hit the reload button and gotten something in English, it wouldn’t have been as humorous a story. Maybe not a story at all. And since this blog entry was categorized under humor, it should probably be taken as such and not to heavily analyzed.
August 20th, 2010 at 2:25 pm
I hate captchas with a burning passion. Recaptcha is especially annoying because the majority of them are completely unreadable.
August 20th, 2010 at 2:25 pm
Usually if you just reload the page you’ll get a different set of words to enter. Sometimes the juxtaposition can be pretty funny.
August 20th, 2010 at 2:25 pm
reCaptcha gives you one word it knows the answer to, and one word from a book Google scanned that their OCR couldn’t recognize. Since hackers probably can’t OCR it either, and since by getting a human to read it they improve the availability of online public domain books… it’s a pretty nice idea. You discovered one of the problems. Sometimes they don’t recognize the word for a reason such that a human wouldn’t help.
Of course, since they don’t actually *know* the answer to one of those words, you don’t actually have to get it right. One guess which one you have to know. In the future you can either just BS the non-word or request a new pair of words.
August 20th, 2010 at 2:26 pm
Seconding post #3 Jeremy – We’re using reCaptcha on a web site. When you type in those funny phrases, you’re actually digitizing a book. It’s still annoying, but it’s preventing spam in the web site that uses it AND the time you spend doing it is for the greater good.
August 20th, 2010 at 2:27 pm
Interestingly, when this happens you can usually just type in nonsense for the bizarro word and get the other word correct. reCapcha is actually a distributed effort to do OCR on old books. Of the two words presented each time, one is a word they’re fairly certain about (and will actually be used to validate your human-ness) and the other is something unknown. They take your answer from this second category of words and put it in a database of responses until a consensus starts to emerge regarding what that illegible-to-computers text is.
reCaptcha is both a verification system and a massively crowd-sourced effort to turns scans of old books into digital text. If I recall correctly, this is how they put the entire NY Times archive on line in such short time.
Presentation by the inventor: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Aszl5avDtek
August 20th, 2010 at 2:30 pm
The funniest part about reCaptura is the fact that sometimes my misspellings make it through just fine.
August 20th, 2010 at 2:31 pm
C’mon, Phil, do your part — those Greek texts aren’t going to digitize themselves!
August 20th, 2010 at 2:36 pm
You should be able to set a shortcut key to switch between Latin and Greek keyboard layouts. In GNOME it’s in System → Preferences → Keyboard → Layouts → Options → Key(s) to change layout. I have this set to the otherwise pointless Scroll Lock. παραλελυμένοι. It’s easy.
August 20th, 2010 at 2:36 pm
he couldn’t find the π key and magically his inbox went from 315 emails to 3.14 *twilight zone music*
August 20th, 2010 at 2:40 pm
From the Did-Too-Much-Research-On-This Department: The word is παραλελυμένοι which shows up in the Greek Bible in Acts 8:7. It transliterates to paralelumenoi from the Greek para (from the side) and luó (to release) and means literally “to loosen or release from the side”. But in context of the sentence in Acts 8:7, it seems to be used to mean “who were paralyzed.” See http://biblos.com/acts/8-7.htm
Why haven’t I gotten anything done today?
August 20th, 2010 at 2:40 pm
παραλελυμένα
Yes! I knew I didn’t study ancient Greek in high school for nothing!
August 20th, 2010 at 2:42 pm
I usually just run Charmap and find the Alt+#### codes for symbols.
August 20th, 2010 at 2:45 pm
It’s a shame that the captcha doesn’t make what’s on the screen audible. heh
PS, i actually love captchas
August 20th, 2010 at 2:50 pm
Even better, it’s ironic: “παραλύομαι: to weaken, disable, paralyze.”
August 20th, 2010 at 2:54 pm
I hate Captcha systems. Most of them display such mangled words I can’t make them out.
August 20th, 2010 at 2:57 pm
Do you mean to say that you have a PC and not an Apple computer. Apple computers come with a function on the top bar that allows you to change the keyboard to any language you want; Greek, German, Russian, whatever … You use a keyboard viewer on the screen and the cursor to type (just remember to change the keyboard back, ελσε ςηατ υοθ τυπε ςιλλ βε αβσολθτε νονσενσε.
August 20th, 2010 at 2:57 pm
ReCaptcha does some good. But captchas in general are both annoying and ultimately useless; most of the more popular captcha implementations have been busted by specialized OCR programs.
Many sites do have strong reason to try to prevent access to their facilities by bots. But it is arguable that there are approaches that are preferable to captcha.
August 20th, 2010 at 3:02 pm
I got one with Chinese characters in it. And many others with the second word written upside down (horizontal mirror). For both it worked by skipping the “bad” word.
August 20th, 2010 at 3:04 pm
@ #1:
No go, the site was “LinkedIn”, not CluedIn”.
August 20th, 2010 at 3:08 pm
You should have hit the audio button, I would love to hear text to voice try to pronounce that word.
August 20th, 2010 at 3:12 pm
Philomenus Plait-o?
August 20th, 2010 at 3:20 pm
Lol mr. Phil, I know that my language is a difficult one to learn and understand, I never knew it could produce such a problem though!
Oh and please DO visit Greece sometime! Many great places for vacations and astronomy nights!
Ευχαριστώ για τις καταπληκτικές δημοσιεύσεις! Σας χαιρετώ!
August 20th, 2010 at 3:49 pm
Rooker: “I hate captchas with a burning passion. Recaptcha is especially annoying because the majority of them are completely unreadable.”
I used to hate Captcha too, Until I started running a web site that allows people to log on. After 50 bots had signed up, I introduced Captcha. Blame the robots – they’re starting to take over…
August 20th, 2010 at 3:53 pm
here you go:
παραλελυμένοι
it means paralyzed, which is what happened to you.
August 20th, 2010 at 4:07 pm
I’m sorry to be the one to break it to you Phil, but we’ve all kind of known about this for a while…
(awkward)
… Uh, so Phil… you’re a robot. Captchas are meant to weed machines out from humans, and well, it looks like this one caught you. To humans, that captcha is a piece of cake. We didn’t want to tell you, because dammit, you get so excited about astronomy, and it’s such a joy to see a machine get excited. Anyway…
We’re working on an upgrade so this type of embarrassment won’t happen to you again. It’s up to you, though: when we install the upgrade, do you want us to make you forget you’re a robot? Take a while to think about it.
And hey, just know our faces are as red as yours on this one.
–Your Creators
August 20th, 2010 at 4:11 pm
If this happens in your Gmail go to: Settings> Filters> Create New Filter. Then create a filter that will cause all emails with the word “LinkedIn” go directly to the Trash.
August 20th, 2010 at 4:35 pm
it’s easy with a mac, just press the Alt key + a bunch of random keys ®
August 20th, 2010 at 4:47 pm
I got this on YouTube’s captcha (no joke):
http://twitpic.com/2c9h2t
August 20th, 2010 at 4:58 pm
A little off topic: I went to a rather conservative high school, split between babtists and mormoms. I got ahold of a t-shirt that had ancient Greek writting on it. Everyone would ask me what it said, and I had no idea, they would always respond: “Well you better find out. It might be something dirty!”
I could never understand why it mattered.
August 20th, 2010 at 5:03 pm
Carey, awesome. Awesome to the max.
Can’t help you. Its Greek to me.
August 20th, 2010 at 5:05 pm
As someone else said, this is from reCaptcha, so it’s nondiscriminately pulling samples their classifier had a hard time with and and getting some free work out of you
I was trying to get concert tickets the other day and had to solve several captchas and there was no shortage of greek or mathematical formulae, which I promptly entered the LaTeX for
August 20th, 2010 at 5:11 pm
Sorry to disappoint all those defenders of reCaptcha here, but it belongs to one of the more annoying captcha systems out there. When I, as normal surfer, get confronted with this thing, I don’t get an explanation of all that you pointed out. I don’t get told the good it does for OCR improvement, or that one of the words is just used for a database for such improvement, and not for the human-bot distinction. All I get is frustration! “Whiskey Tango Foxtrot is that? Is that a ligature? How shall I type THAT? HEEELLLLP!” Besides, I do NOT want to help with OCR improvement. All I want is to get my user account or whatever.
I understand the need for a human-bot distinction, but some of the captcha systems out there do a whole lot better than reCaptcha in terms of user frustration. For all you web masters out there, you might want to check some of the others, if you do not want to annoy the hell out of your new users.
August 20th, 2010 at 5:14 pm
Carey wins. Thank you for the Friday afternoon smile
August 20th, 2010 at 5:28 pm
In my opinion reCaptcha is one of the better ones. I rarely encounter a word I can’t read.
Others are far, far worse. Especially ones that are case sensitive AND randomly change the size of the letters. Try telling apart an upper or lowercase c, o, p, s, u, v, w, x, or z when you can’t rely on height, or k or m when they start deforming the letters. Or ones that have fonts that contain just a vertical line, it is impossible to tell whether it is an I, l, or 1. Or telling apart a 5 or s, 6 or b, or 9 or g when they completely deforming the letters. And many stick random lines or curves all over the picture, which is fine in theory but they often obscure essential parts of the latter. How do they expect you to tell if something is an F or an E when they stuck a random thick line over the bottom of the letter? Or a T or a t when there is a random thick vertical line at the top?
reCaptcha rarely has those problems since the letters are all in the same font. Some I captchas have to do 6 or 7 times before I encounter one that is even possible to solve without guessing for at least one of the characters. I’ve never had to do a reCaptcha more than twice before I got through, and I almost never have to guess.
August 20th, 2010 at 6:00 pm
Another vote for Carey (#32). The best post of the day.
August 20th, 2010 at 6:04 pm
Phil,
I have been receiving a LOT of phishing messages lately, which are falsified LinkedIn “join” messages. I assume/hope that the message you received was authentic.
August 20th, 2010 at 6:16 pm
@23: You can trivially change the keyboard language/layout in Windows, or use the Charmap utility that’s been around for 20 years, or use the On-Screen Keyboard in the language of your choice, or use one of probably dozens of other software options.
August 20th, 2010 at 6:19 pm
@ TallmanGr:
Does that invitation stand for the Bad Astronomer’s internet acolytes, too?
I make the world’s best baklavá, if it makes a difference.
August 20th, 2010 at 6:20 pm
I encounter this kind of thing quite regularly. Rather than running the foreign language keyboard, there’s a simpler way to handle this.
If you run Windows, open the Character Map application. It’s under Accessories. I don’t want to ramble on too long for this audience, but the characters can be font-specific. CharMap will usually default to Arial and that’s probably the best place to start.
As you find each character (assuming there’s more than one), click it then the Select button. You’ll build a series of characters this way in the “Characters to copy” box at the bottom. When you’ve got all you want click the Copy button. The entire word (assuming it’s a word!) is now in your clipboard.
Finally, go back to the reCaptcha dialog and use the Edit | Paste command (Ctrl-V for you hot shots). Not all receiving apps can accept the special characters, but as a reCaptcha, I’d definitely expect no problems on that front.
In your example, π is character 03C0 in the Arial character set, if you want lower case. Π is the uppercase version, nearby at 03A0.
Really unusual characters require you to look at other fonts. I recently had an interesting experience looking up the pharmacy prescription symbol, which turns out to be quite exotic in terms of it’s font coding.
August 20th, 2010 at 6:29 pm
hold down the -alt- key and type “227″ to get π
But yes Captcha is annoying!
August 20th, 2010 at 7:11 pm
You’re not hiring???
There goes my dream of working for Phil Plait enterprises.
August 20th, 2010 at 7:15 pm
I’ve had little problem with most Captchas, but SyFyWyre .. er, Blastr, had a system that was almost completely unusable. The problem was that when you initially read a post, you would get to the ‘leave a reply/comment’, and there was a Captcha with a letter sequence. However, if you entered the Captcha correctly, you would be wrong, because the system was reading the ‘next set’ instead of the visible one.
I kept my commenting to a minimum, because what I would do is:
Open and read the article, and comments
Decide to comment, so I’d enter the information (username, etc.) and my comment
Right-click on the Captcha and select ‘view image’
Note the letters (useful ‘sticky note’ program for quick but shortlived notes)
Use the BACK command to get back to the post with my comments
Enter the letter sequence, which now agreed with the Captcha on screen.
Click to submit.. wait a minute or two (it was very slow) to see if the comment cleared
J/P=?
August 20th, 2010 at 7:23 pm
I guess all those thousands of emails asking for employment ended up in your spam folder.
August 20th, 2010 at 7:23 pm
@ Carey: WIN!
August 20th, 2010 at 7:31 pm
You only have to actually type one word in captcha, and it’s the one that actually looks typable. in this case, you would only have to type “strakir” for it to verify. To expand: If the word is really low quality (as if it were scanned from a book), that isn’t word you type. If one word is really wavy and the other isn’t, the really wavy word isn’t the one you type. If the word has a special character in it (like ñ), it isn’t the word you type.
August 20th, 2010 at 7:44 pm
You can type any word you want in place of the greek letters and it will be accepted. Recapcha is a clever system designed to digitize books. One of the words (in this case the greek one) is scanned from a book, and the other is genarated randomly. You must type the randomly genarated word correctly, but recapcha has no idea what the book word should be. The book word is put there to trick you into helping digitize a book, because this is something computers can’t do very well.
August 20th, 2010 at 7:59 pm
Carey,
You can try to reboot Phil, but he runs on Apple so you have to wait a year and see if Steve Jobs decides to update Phil. Now if Phil was running Linux, you would be able to get the updates to him much sooner.
At one point Phil was running on Unix (and I think there was even a VAX version of him) but he was too rough around the edges. The Apple design personality is much smoother and refined and fits his new job as a TV star better than the old Unix one.
August 20th, 2010 at 8:24 pm
” When I tried to use the audio option, it started reciting numbers at me. Um, thanks? ”
3.14159… ad infinitum
August 20th, 2010 at 10:11 pm
Get to know your local Alt key (and its X friends), Phil.
[puns intended]
August 20th, 2010 at 10:18 pm
Carey, you literally made me laugh out loud. COTW! oh wait… that’s that other blog…
August 20th, 2010 at 10:18 pm
Yeah, I woulda recommended hitting the refresh button above the audio button. But still, those recaptchas drive me crazy. I understand they need to stop spammers, but they’ve become so ridiculously difficult to read and if I’m not at a computer where audio is an option (trying to comment on a website at my lunch break at work, for instance) I’m hitting reload for 20 minutes until I get one that I can read.
August 21st, 2010 at 2:50 am
Happened to me too, with even more exotic characters. But you can always refresh the captcha!
August 21st, 2010 at 5:05 am
I really want to get a catcha installed on my website http://www.uklw.co.uk because i get a lot of spam mail and it starting to get really irritating.
August 21st, 2010 at 6:47 am
How to type Greek.
August 21st, 2010 at 8:56 am
With Yahoo email, all I have to do is mark it as spam.
As an old retired guy, I get a LOT of spam. It’s so much fun to just scan the folder and hit “delete all”.
Gary 7
August 21st, 2010 at 2:49 pm
Maybe it’s supposed to be a math equation, and you have to solve it to get through.
August 22nd, 2010 at 3:34 pm
Horizontal Mirror…
[...] human-bot distinction, but some of the captcha systems out there do a whole lot better than reCaptch [...]…
August 23rd, 2010 at 8:16 am
Maybe it’s a random foreign language word inserted in an English-language book. Some old-time writers would do that. Tant pis!
I see that David (17) over-researched that one. I wonder if it works when you do type it in? Or if there is reCaptcha in Greek?
http://it.slashdot.org/story/10/08/05/2054247/ReCAPTCHAnet-Now-Vulnerable-to-Algorithmic-Attack
refers to a serious assault on reCaptcha security. This make take you to evil places online, so be careful – I hit something nasty today somwhere else, how nasty I’m not sure yet.
August 23rd, 2010 at 10:04 pm
Did you try
Start-> all programs -> Accessories -> system tools -> character map ->
and then pick a typeface that includes greek symbols (Arial, courier new)?
August 25th, 2010 at 8:17 am
Just to point out the obvious: the explanations above regards recaptcha only knowing one word also explain why the audio alternative is unrelated to the words shown…
August 25th, 2010 at 2:05 pm
The post itself shows that the author does not understand the purpose of LinkedIn or of networking in general. You BUILD a network through LinkedIn to offer your expertise to others. You don’t join just to get a job. It doesn’t work that way. You have to have a value proposition others find useful, help others genuinely by making other connections, sharing knowledge, etc. If and when the time comes that you need a job, or just have a question, you will have built a good network to tap into.
The author of this post completely misses the point of networking.
September 13th, 2010 at 2:49 pm
OMFG …please stop my rolling…the pebbles and hard crumbs on my floor are starting to hurt!