Social Times - Latest Comments in Is iPhone Captcha Necessary?

Re: Is iPhone Captcha Necessary?

AUBob — Tue, 22 Mar 2011 19:45:29 -0000

Speculate that this site may have had an issue with fraud and bots in the past - if this app just fronts a website - i can change my user-agent to simulate Iphone and then write a bot to subscribe accounts to a service thats not protected by CAPTCHA.. It may be this was an issue for the site/app in the past - and i'd be interested to see how the site is dealing with the issue now they have removed CAPTCHA - either spammers havent figured out the hole - or there is another solution

Re: Is iPhone Captcha Necessary?

bob — Thu, 24 Feb 2011 23:54:44 -0000

it's not in the Evernote app anymore

Re: Is iPhone Captcha Necessary?

Syed Absar — Mon, 07 Feb 2011 09:53:43 -0000

Maybe a common-sense question with cute multiple choices answers provide better usability to user as well as prevention to spam.

Re: Is iPhone Captcha Necessary?

Freeview HD Recorder — Tue, 25 May 2010 05:11:07 -0000

Superb post that covers the topic in the right amount of detail.

Re: Is iPhone Captcha Necessary?

barristers chambers — Tue, 25 May 2010 05:03:47 -0000

Thank you for such a informative post. This is always a hot topic for debates and made a interesting read. Could have done with a few more pictures if possible.

Re: Is iPhone Captcha Necessary?

Ricardo — Wed, 24 Mar 2010 10:51:20 -0000

1) He's talking about an app, not a website
2) I still think it's necessary for certain apps. They can be disassembled and then the service calls used to get the "secure" data can be spoofed.
3) how did they get the reCAPTCHA working on an iPhone anyway?

Re: Is iPhone Captcha Necessary?

kaiesh — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 07:34:25 -0000

As someone heavily involved in application design/coding, I find that some form of human verification is necessary on any web application, otherwise forms are subject to spam from bots. I'm still trying to figure out the best way to implement this on mobile platforms.

I agree that typing in the same type of captchas used for desktop styled pages is very annoying - it also has the problem that not all mobile browsers can reliably process the javascript.

It's been a year since this post was posted, but I still haven't found an alternative! Any ideas?

Re: Is iPhone Captcha Necessary?

Charlie — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 09:51:15 -0000

I'm actually surprised to see you ask why it's necessary. Of COURSE it's necessary. We live in a world of bots and automated registration that only leads to spam, spam, and more spam. If they didn't require captcha for all user-agents, then someone could just spoof the user-agent header to pretend like they were an iPhone and make 10,000 accounts.