I have to disagree... I wouldnt say ReCaptcha is useless
Right now, ReCaptcha is rendered useless.. but it had been top of it's game until it was beaten (it is however a silly game in my opinion)
Google have a fair amount of cash to develop it and make changes, and they do frequently (which is one of the things that made it hard to beat, the continuous changes)
They provide it freely, and it's used more than 100 million times every day
You can train an Artificial Neural Network (or OCR) against a set, but if you keep changing the data set, you create a moving target which is incredibly hard to pin down
This is one of the things that made/makes it difficult to beat
After some updates, you may notice it will be working again, and then it will be broken again
The frustration happens on both sides, it's broken for bot users or it's broken for those of us who want it to stop bot users
The problem is not ReCAPTCHA, the problem is the use of common automation to beat another automated process (the applications on both side keep updating... it's a war)
Customisations however pops out this loop
It is in my opinion a waste of time and money to create a system whose only fail safe is a continuous update, and for this system to be widely used and thus make it a target
This just means the bot will also continuously update, and once it is beaten, the damage is extensive
I would not call it useless... just incredibly common and thus it makes it self a target rendering it for the time being 'useless'
