Before

Before the new Captcha implementation

After

After the new Captcha was implemented

It seems Rapidshare is revving up its security, that it has come to a point, I can’t even recognize some of the Captcha characters being displayed.

It’s so hard and I’ve to give a guess. Couple of times into it, only then would I be successful to complete my download

What Rapidshare says

As every free user should have noticed, we are experimenting once again with the CAPTCHA system. The reason is that RapidShare is popular enough for people to create tools to download from RapidShare as a free user as if they were a premium user. This has a negative impact for our paying premium users, since they expect a fast download. On the other hand we are also experimenting with happy hours again. When our servers have enough spare bandwidth, we will make it easier for free users to download from RapidShare, knowing that this also makes it possible again to automatically download files with those tools. Right now the RapidShare Happy Hours will disable the download tickets and the captchas completely

via source