Most sites use reCAPTCHA to protect against bot registrations, sometimes targeted to their specific registration system. Any simple solution would defeat the purpose of a CAPTCHA.
Would it though? If each system was unique and rotated through different types of challenges, the bot would have to be custom tailored to handle every challenge type.
i.e. free form questions, count the gray dots (vision impaired friendly), math questions, play tic-tac-toe and get a stalemate, ascii hang-man ... I could think of hundreds of different challenges. The bot would have to constantly adapt and the bot developer would have to really love puzzles. The bot consumers would have to update constantly and would have to learn all the challenges of each site owner.
As a bonus, google the all knowing, is less knowing and no longer a gate-keeper.
I would be honored to help them feed their families. It would be a fun game of cat and mouse. Based on discussions here, it sounds like people have already automated Google captcha. I will go ahead and work on a few of my own and see what happens.
Looks like you have a great business plan at hand. Beat Google with a potentially superior product and help employ some people in developing countries!
Yeah, but you won't build a business on that, you'll add GPS trackers, make renters show you their drivers licenses etc. A captcha isn't "wrong" in general in my mind, it's just not something you add and you're all done, and it shouldn't be your first line of defense. It can be part of a multi-pronged anti-abuse strategy, but it's a very tricky part: it doesn't offer a lot of protection but creates a lot of friction for actual, legit users. Running a DNA test on somebody can be a good way to verify their identity. But asking for their ID card and looking at the picture is a lot quicker, cheaper and less intrusive.
I don't see captchas a lot, because I'm not frequenting sites that use them. A friend of mine apparently does, so often that he pays for a captcha solver while he's sitting in front of his computer. He just can't be bothered to play Google's mind games, so he'd rather pay a few cents a day to not deal with it.
We've come to the point where humans are paying for services that were created for bots so they can bypass technological hurdles that were meant to tell humans from bots.
