I must say that I find that highly unlikely. Take a look at Paypal registration to see an example of the images generated - even though I am a firm beleiver that anything can be written in perl, eventaully, this really funny little trick isn't coming close to breaking the paypal images. Nor was it intended to, of course. :)

Reading a character in an image is old news as such, so paypal uses a lot of different "blurring" techniques, such as drawing lines at random intervals, moving the characters inside the image and using a font that is hard to interpret - and probably other things too.

Just so any paypal users can sleep a little tonight...

Interesting. I wonder if it might be possible to use something like a hopfield network to defeat such schemes. Ages ago, I wrote a simple implementation, and it's available here, but that code is probably both ugly and not as algorithmically good as it could be.