Very interesting alternative for captcha

Yeah, that's a "no dice" *snicker. Make's the counting dots "crackability" issue irrelevant really. Oh well. Maybe Ill just give out 2 factor auth tokens to everyone.

I read the argument you site somewhere a year or so ago and obviously, I disagree on the further obfuscating approach and thus why I am interested is something less complex. These captchas are quickly becoming too high a bar for average humans and I'll go so far as so say they have become a deterrent, annoyance and/or hindrance to most users and are therefore counterproductive. What I am hoping for is someone to think out of the box and come up with a better,simpler, human friendlier solution than "further obfuscation" which means increasingly less usability which ultimately wont fly.

You get $.01USD change;)

I agree with you that CAPTCHAs are already infuriatingly "obfuscated" and don't need to be any more so. I actually won't use ReCaptcha on my sites because I can hardly read it myself. (But then again, I don't have to deal with the determined spam storms that higher profile sites do.)

What is needed is some simple, elegant, why-didn't-I-think-of-that solution for CAPTCHA, like public-key encryption was for network security. Something like the AYAH idea perhaps - just as hard for computers to crack, but easier for human users to pass.

Obviously it won't work to just keep contorting the text more and more until it resembles the ripples in strawberry revel ice cream.