Several research projects have broken real world CAPTCHAs ...
That strikes me as one of the least beneficial research projects that I have ever heard of. I really hope they didn’t publish their methods freely.
I would hope that they did. The immediate benefit of such research is that it will show which features of CAPTCHAs are really easy to circumvent, and therefore it will help people to build stronger CAPTCHAs, and thus to keep out more spammers.
Side benefits in fields such as image recognition are also probable.
The idealistic side of me agrees, but the cynic side knows perfectly well that in this day and age, security through obscurity doesn’t work well for long.
From the Wikipedia article on CAPTCHAs:
Upvoted. Take that, five years ago!
That strikes me as one of the least beneficial research projects that I have ever heard of. I really hope they didn’t publish their methods freely.
I would hope that they did. The immediate benefit of such research is that it will show which features of CAPTCHAs are really easy to circumvent, and therefore it will help people to build stronger CAPTCHAs, and thus to keep out more spammers.
Side benefits in fields such as image recognition are also probable.
also this xkcd comic seems very on topic
The idealistic side of me agrees, but the cynic side knows perfectly well that in this day and age, security through obscurity doesn’t work well for long.