I imagine requiring your users to fake a MAC Address is a pretty effective captcha. For Dropbox, it's probably better to reduce the friction in the sign up flow than to prevent against these kinds of edge cases.
> I imagine requiring your users to fake a MAC Address is a pretty effective captcha.
I guess we disagree over the meaning of the term 'captcha' then. Besides that, it is also pretty trivial to spoof a MAC address.
> For Dropbox, it's probably better to reduce the friction in the sign up flow than to prevent against these kinds of edge cases.
Agreed. But there are smarter ways to do it. Take Gmail for example - it normally doesn't require you to pass a captcha. But if you fail a certain number of login attempts, it does. How hard can it be to start displaying a captcha after, say, 5 accounts get registered within 24 hours for the same IP address?
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What if I told you... this could have been prevented by using captchas?
I imagine requiring your users to fake a MAC Address is a pretty effective captcha. For Dropbox, it's probably better to reduce the friction in the sign up flow than to prevent against these kinds of edge cases.
> I imagine requiring your users to fake a MAC Address is a pretty effective captcha.
I guess we disagree over the meaning of the term 'captcha' then. Besides that, it is also pretty trivial to spoof a MAC address.
> For Dropbox, it's probably better to reduce the friction in the sign up flow than to prevent against these kinds of edge cases.
Agreed. But there are smarter ways to do it. Take Gmail for example - it normally doesn't require you to pass a captcha. But if you fail a certain number of login attempts, it does. How hard can it be to start displaying a captcha after, say, 5 accounts get registered within 24 hours for the same IP address?
It would have been harder to do but not impossible.
5 seconds per captcha * 30000 accounts = ~42 hours That is if they use can't OCR.
Your eyes will bleed after 42 hours.
It can be distributed to 10 students which would make it 4.2 hours per person. That's more than doable.
would you do it? :)
I wouldn't. That doesn't mean someone else wouldn't.
Heck if you can get 1000 students to do it, then it's just 2.5 minutes. Now that's something that even I would do.