Fooling Around

I recently came across a discussion about automated reader of CAPTCHA images. A guy told they sold an implementation of such a reader for $100K (in total; certain initial payment followed by $5K/mo payments). While this might appear to be an exaggeration, I recalled another interview given by another OCR fellow who mentioed a simiar offer he declined for reasons he chose to not specify.

I am afraid I am losing something here, as CAPTCHA reader questions in in most cases not an issue as soon as it is required to decode particular type of images. Image prefiltering followed by OCR will pass through 95% of the protection implementations around, one need only an experienced software engineer and a desire to break the protection complemented by a modest budget. Moreover, CAPTCHA code can be changed anytime so the game is actually of a different nature: one makes it harder to decode in automated fashion and the other tries to get even. I would rather say that the task for the former guy is more difficult (as soon as we still expect web user to be able to recognize the code).

Just received a reply on my tech support request to a third party ISV (independent software vendor, if anything). It took a month to respond with a few paragraphs of text, which however looks more like a template rather than requested information. I am not even sure who does a favor to whom, me to them trying to sort issues out or they helping our client (not us, in fact).

We do care about our customers and I really think we do it right way because they write like this:

You have the best support of any mission critical software we use in our business. It is very much appreciated.

By the way, though it is a my decision to not mention the titles of the product and the company under this “Seriously” category, I see it is still here in Google AdSense context advertisement. Thus, Google is clever enough to reveal the concealed.

Overview

This white paper is intended to help the reader understand the roles and benefit of both the MJPEG and
the MPEG-4 compression methods, and when to use which one based on necessity and performance. It
begins with some basic concepts that relate to both image size (in pixels) and PPF (pixels per foot).
This is followed by some background information on compression: why it was needed, and how it is
accomplished; finally, each compression method is described separately, listing the key advantages of
each.

MJPEG vs MPEG4 from onssi.com