Original new CAPTCHA
Posted on 12 March 2007 (10:57 PM)
Tired of CAPTCHA's? A Dutch paper reported an interesting new development in Internet authorisation today, involving homeless cats and dogs.
Together with a shelter for stray cats and dogs, Microsoft's John Douceur is working on a new way of authorising users. It's going to be a replacement for the regular CAPTCHA technique that is currently popular on the Web.
Computers get better and better at recognizing CAPTCHA's and therefore Internet-security is in jeopardy. A computer cannot yet, however, recognize the difference between a cat and a dog. The idea behind the new authorisation technique is the following: a user is presented with 10 pictures of cats and dogs and should click on all the cats in order to proceed to the next page.
I think it's an interesting new technique, especially because I'm not a big fan of the current CAPTCHA's, which are sometimes too hard to decipher even for humans.
I am a little skeptical about the subject however, because I don't see 10 pictures of cute kittens and doggies on a corporate business website. Unless it's going to be a highly popular technique (read: a hyped, Web two.oh technique), I don't believe I can sell it to (all my) clients.
But the idea is great. If I could only replace cats and dogs by something a little more neutral, it could be a very good alternative.
In the article I've read the technique is not given a name, which made Googling for more information a little hard. If you have an online subscription to the Dutch Metro newspaper, you can read the article in today's issue (it's on the ninth page).
Filed under Industry and Culture
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Comments:
If you google for captcha you wil find that this idea is not new at all, just one of the ways to make a captcha. You will then also find out that the reason there is no separate name for it is that captcha is an abbreviation for a method of 'human only recognition' of a situation which goes for the dogs/cats method as well as all the other ones.
A less known captcha is to ask for a locally well known information. I came across that idea first on Henk's blog www.hetlab.tk. An example is to ask for the capitol of your country. On an english based site that would'nt do but on a localised site it will since the bots that are scouring the web seldomly are localised so they won't know what the question is.
There's also http://www.hotcaptcha.com - very cool!
this comment has been quoted by Harmen Janssen
Haha, that's great, thanks for the link :)