I have been spending a bit of time everyday in reporting webpages that has copied or scraped content from my blog. Some people may think that it is fine to copy because there’s no wrong in sharing knowledge but they should at least write it in their own words together with a linkback and not just simply copying and pasting on their website. Writing an article can take hours to even days to complete depending on the level of difficulty in research while it takes less than 10 seconds for the other person to reproduce it on their website. Not only it is unfair to the original author who written the article, they are also polluting the search engine with the same duplicate content, possibly causing penalties to the original author by Google.
There are a couple of steps involved in order to report the webpages to Google which is to search for the links, check to confirm if the webpage still contains the copied content, compile and sort the list of URLs according, finally filling up and submitting an online form. I have been constantly trying to improve the steps by automating them as much as possible to save time.
Before I can submit the online DMCA form to Google Web Search, I must first complete the captcha test by typing the two words shown on the box. The CAPTCHA test is meant to prevent automated submission by robots so that only real humans can legitimately submit the form. The Google Web Search DMCA form uses reCAPTCHA system where it consists of two words and to be honest some of them are really hard to read.
The most annoying part is when I got the captcha wrong even after spending some effort in trying to type in the correct letters and numbers that is displayed to me. I don’t mind solving CAPTCHA once or twice but it is really mentally challenging if I needed to continuously solving them. There are some paid services for automated captcha recognition and mostly they are used to integrate into software via API but I needed to automatically solve the captcha from the web browser.
Fortunately I found Rumola, probably the only online service for now that offers automated captcha recognition from the web browser via extensions. That means if you land on any webpage that requires you to solve the captcha by typing the letters and numbers that appear in the image, Rumola does it for you when you start filling up the form. Rumola doesn’t crack the captcha but instead the captcha that is shown to you are automatically sent to them for manual processing by real humans and then send it back to your browser.
To use Rumola for automated typing of CAPTCHA in your web browser, you will need to register a free account followed by installing the extension. The extension doesn’t require any configuration and will be automatically bound to your account via browser cookie. The video below is a demo of Rumola automatically recognize and type in the CAPTCHA words when I start to fill up the form.
After testing Rumola with reCAPTCHA, I find that Rumola is quite accurate and takes about 20 seconds to help me type in the 2 words to solve reCAPTCHA. If you managed to fill up the form quicker than Rumola solving the CAPTCHA, you can click on the CAPTCHA box to manually enter the CAPTCHA. Rumola is a paid service and they do offer a free trial account for you to test their service. The trial account comes with 10 credits and you can top up 50 credits for $0.99 or 150 credits for $1.95 both valid for 6 months. Solving each captcha costs 1 credit. If you have a task that constantly requires you to fill up captcha boxes in your Firefox, Chrome or Safari web browser, then Rumola is a huge time and effort saver with only a fraction of cost. Currently Rumola supports Firefox, Chrome and Safari but you can sign up for the notification where you will be notified when they begin supporting your browser.
Hi Raymond, I admit I’ve posted the following on another of Your blogs (2 july 2012)
so forgive me – I think it’s an important comtary on all this (re)Captcha-thing …
“Hi Raymond, I like Your Blog and Your good advices .
But there’s one logical question I think You should raise when You advice people
to use (re)Captcha “solvers” :
The original intention of (re)Captcha boxes was to let humans in and stop “robots” …
Now humans have to use “robots”/”solvers” to be able to get past the (re)Captcha box !?!?
This problem is growing for normal internet-users
and no important blogger comment much about this .”
Thought it was worth mentioning here too .
man read carefully this made for blind people whats illegal in this ?
For download purposes, it’s better using Miponi plus the FREE Plugin Captcha Trader.
@devcih, How can I send the invitation to you? Any contact or something? btw, webvisum is only for firefox.
If the Captcha is illegible, you can simply click the loop to get another one. Usually, after three or four tries, you’ll get one that is legible.
I’ve been using Rumola on Safari for about three weeks now and it’s the best thing since the invention of sliced bread. As an old guy, anything that saves me time and avoids the frustration of misguessing is a winner.
@TheRube: It is probably a false detection. I’ve scanned Rumola’s website at Sucuri SiteCheck and it came up as clean and not blacklisted. Thanks for reporting.
sitecheck.sucuri.net/results/http://skipinput.com/
@devcih: I noticed that as well. After reading your comment, I’ve just tested one of the website that only has 4 random numbers and Rumola didn’t detect it.
CAPTCHA can be useless to transfer it to popular forums at background during authentication challenge and send back to browser with highest occurrence input.
Hello Raymond.
I clicked on the Rumola link on the page.
However, I was re-directed to a website that was termed “Malicious” by the Malwarebytes web scanner and so it did not permit the suspect page to open.
I thought you’d like to know.
Regards,
TR
Rumola able to decrypt captcha for yahoo new account but not for this one: tinypic.com/view.php?pic=2rc51yr&s=6
@Boy: cud you plz invite me for webvisum.com membership
Have not tried yet, but the video and description very helpful. Some sites using captcha are so “good” I have to zoom the page to ridiculous size and press the get-another reloader until I find one I can read. Especially frustrating on some sites I frequently use multiple advanced searches. Price point seems okay since I wouldn’t have to use it every time, just when frustration goes to higher level. Brilliant idea and thanks for the article. BTW, I posted my comment on one of your articles (the BolehVPN article) on Facebook and when I added the URL, it nicely posted/linked so everyone could see it is yours.
Common enough to do, but when you see quite a few co-workers/friends/family that can still hardly copy/paste, I think some just don’t have a clue how to format/link-back to the original source (or are too lazy).
Hi Raymond. You can also use WebVisum. It is actually maint to help the visually impaired person like me to solve CAPTCHA. It is free, but donation is most welcome to support their project. 20 CAPTCHA per day. Do check out their website at webvisum.com