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Kitties, Hotties, And Captchas
David Utter
Staff Writer
2007-03-26
 Security News RSS Feed
The use of captcha technology has helped limit the impact of spam on sites that accept comments or other submissions from users; a couple of photo-oriented options offer something different from the usual hard-to-read letters and numbers in captcha forms.
A captcha is a form of Turing test, where it can help determine if the person entering responses is a human or an automated spam bot at work.
People have seen captchas spring up all over the Internet, on blog commenting and other web forms. Though they are not foolproof, captchas can deter a significant amount of junk from showing up on someone's site.
The tech gossip site Valleywag presented a couple of options for captchas being made available to people. The first comes from Microsoft Research, and it's called Asirra.
Pictures of cats and dogs appear, and the reader has to select the cats by clicking on them, then submitting the form. Asirra has been developed so that a given form's 'ticket' can't be reused over and over to bypass the validation used to protect a website.
Another, cheekier option mashes up the people at Hot or Not with a captcha check. The developer of hotcaptcha calls it "using mashups to reach new heights (or new lows?) in security."
Hotaptcha presents the visitor with nine images of women (or men if the users chooses to switch the pics) and asks that the person "select the three hot people." Do that and submit, and the script will tell the person if it thinks he or she is human or a robot.
Taste issues notwithstanding, both Asirra and hotcaptcha have a significant drawback. They are visually oriented, which makes them much less useful to people with vision problems who browse the Internet.
Picture-based captchas like these also take up a lot of space. Though both are freely available to those who wish to use them, the lack of a sound-based test plus the extra space may not be worth the time investment.
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Tags: Captcha, Internet, Security
About the Author:
David Utter is a business and technology writer for SecurityProNews and WebProNews.
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