[thelist] State of the art in CAPTCHA decoding?

[Bernardo Escalona-Espinosa]

Hello list,

While implementing a "type the word that you see in the image" CAPTCHA
for my spam-riddled blog i started wondering about this.

I was reading this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Captcha#Computer_character_recognition
and was suddenly very scared!

How freely available are CAPTCHA-defeating programs, and how powerful
are the ones available to the regular amateur spammer?

Do simple features such as "text at an angle", increasing the length
of the "secret word", and using random letters instead of dictionary
words even matter?

These CAPTCHAs are beginning to get ridiculous, in the sense that the
degree of garbledness needed is so extreme that I can barely read the
"secret words" myself in some of the sites. So an optional
philosophical question would be: what do you imagine the next step to
be?

Thanks in advance for the enlightenment.

-- 
___________________________________________
Bernardo Escalona Espinosa
  mobile: 0176 / 24 82 35 34
  http://www.bernsonline.com/