• Steve (unregistered)

    Me, I just want to know what happens when you click "Audio". An automated voice will read out F R I S T Having typed that in you'll then be asked to click on fire hydrants or cars until the first of either the world runs out of electricity, or you lose patience

  • Prime Mover (unregistered)

    I suspect someone in Vodafone has clicked on TDWTMGM* and decided there's a bad word which is unacceptable for children

    *The Daily What The My Goodness Me

  • RLB (unregistered)

    QKV NQKH. Am I missing the problem?

  • (nodebb)

    The Vodafone one made me think of my misadventures with Vodafone's French partner, SFR, back in 2009.

    OK, so the late Mrs Cynic and I had Voda PAYG phones back in the UK, then we moved to France. Knowing that SFR was their French partner, I grabbed a pair of SFR PAYG SIMs. So far, so good. It seemed to work without major difficulty.

    Well. "Seemed to" hides a variety of things, and in this case it was that SFR's parental control filters (network side, mind, not the ones in the phones) blocked access to the map data for the Google Maps app (Samsung i900 Omnia, a nice enough WinMobile 6.1 phone, once you get past it having a stylus but not having a slot for the stylus).

    We went to see the nice folks at SFR, and they said that we'd have to write dead-tree letters to SFR's customer service in order to get the parental filters removed. The nice folks at Orange could clearly see we were both adults (and took us at our word that we had no children), and were happy to sell us contracts without parental filters.

  • (nodebb) in reply to RLB

    I'm curious about this too. The warped letters are standard for CAPTCHAs, the "New" button gives you a new set of warped letters, the "Audio" button, as Steve points out, gives you some warped audio, and the input field at the bottom is where you type your answer. What are we missing?

  • Jaloopa (partially registered) (unregistered)

    Mark appears to be a robot. The captcha isn't particularly difficult

    Captcha: QKLNQKH

  • my name is missing (unregistered)

    I always click on email from Microsoft that says "we work continuously to strengthen the threats against our financial institution". Must be fun working at Microsoft's bank.

  • (nodebb)

    The only issue I can see with the CAPTCHA is that it's not clear whether the frist Q is on the frist line or the escond.

    And Jaloopa seems to think the V is an L.

  • Foo AKA Fooo (unregistered) in reply to RLB

    Me too. The 3rd letter might be a V or an L, that's it. Way easier than all CAPTCHAs I've seen for many years, including on this site!

    @OP: Want to know what happens when you click "Audio"? Why don't you try it? My random guess is you get some audio, duh! Not a reading of those letters (if you mean that), but probably something else. Just like on this site, BTW, where I always do so because I'm so tired of clicking hydrants and ambiguous traffic lights.

  • (nodebb)

    The wording in the "Microsoft" email make it clear this is a phishing scam. Mind you, the grammar is better than most of the phishing emails I see, so the person behind this is probably not ESL. The return address is also a clue; msn.com email addresses are strictly client emails. All the employee emails come from microsoft.com (which is not available for client email accounts). Always hover any link in an email and check that it is going where you think it is going.

  • Code Refactorer (unregistered) in reply to Barry Margolin 0

    You say the N can be in "first or second line", but there is also the possibility that it can be in "first and second line": The N in the first line is warped down, and the N in the second line is warped up, 100% overlapping the N in the first line.

  • Prime Mover (unregistered) in reply to Foo AKA Fooo

    From a wider perspective, I'm more than happy to have a captcha that contributes towards the effectiveness of self-driving cars. The sooner that technology finally arrives at our doors, the sooner I can make my own way home drunk from the pub without calling a cab..

  • BruceDesertrat (unregistered)

    Along the lines of the Vodaphone WTF, our campus-mandated AV/Malware/Webfiltering provider, who shall remain unnamed, but rhymes with Hophos informed me that I could not access my veterinarian's website because it was a 'sexually explicit Adult site'.

  • Rib (unregistered) in reply to Jaloopa (partially registered)

    How do you whether the N is in the 1st or 2nd line?

  • Loren Pechtel (unregistered)

    The last one is probably a profanity filter.

  • Gene Lenkov (unregistered)

    It only says to enter the characters you see, but it doesn't mention anything about their order... and so I will go with NQKVH

  • Some Ed (unregistered) in reply to Prime Mover

    You assume that the self-driving cars are going to be cheap enough you can afford one. I could see them being sold at a price tag that only taxi companies could afford them (and only then because it allows them to shaft their drivers.)

  • Grunthos the Flatulent (unregistered) in reply to Prime Mover

    Good luck on the not guilty plea of "being drunk in charge of a self-driving vehicle". For reference it doesn't work with horses even they do know where you live...

  • Grunthos the Flatulent (unregistered) in reply to Rib

    Why do you assume its a N when it could be a warped "Z" and is actually the first character of the first line.... ;-)

    ... in whatever instance I don't see this as a WTF anyway - unless you mean WTF is the OP doing posting this?

  • (nodebb)

    There's sufficient ambiguity between:

        QKV
      N  
          QKH
    

    or

        Q
      N  KV
          QKH
    

    or

      NQKV
          QKH
    

    and that's not even counting the L-V ambiguity.

  • WTFGuy (unregistered)

    @Foo AKA Fooo ref

    because I'm so tired of clicking hydrants and ambiguous traffic lights.

    Last time I posted I got to pick out boats. I was saddeded to see how happy the quarry being something other than crosswalks, hydrants, and traffic lights made me.

    This time was stairs.

  • Edd (unregistered)

    these capchas are always getting harder, you'd think they try to keep out everyone

  • 516052 (unregistered)

    Not everyone. Remember, they come from google. That means the system knows your browsing patterns, politics, taste in porn etc. And it's selectivelly applying the capchas to weed out undesirables.

  • Redbird (unregistered) in reply to RLB
    Comment held for moderation.

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