How to Smell Difference Between Humans & Robots - Annoying Captcha Forms
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Re: How to Smell Difference Between Humans & Robots - Annoying Captcha Forms
#2Good ole stackoverflow - close topics that may bring new ideas for turing tests.
The entire thread has a number of good ideas and relates to a thread you started the other day. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2107972 Pity that it didn't get more traction.
Re: How to Smell Difference Between Humans & Robots - Annoying Captcha Forms
#3The problem with this idea is that if a distinctly 'human behavior' can be calculated, it can be emulated. Also, it would require a lot of JS and other support that some people don't have. There's also the problem of false negatives when you consider auto-fillers that a lot of people use.
Re: How to Smell Difference Between Humans & Robots - Annoying Captcha Forms
#4Interesting ideas but several drawbacks most notably a) If you have some set of heuristics that serve as a proxy for information (in this case "humanness") then people can easily optimize on the proxy and win and b) the code would be running on the client-side and as a result super hackable
Re: How to Smell Difference Between Humans & Robots - Annoying Captcha Forms
#5I've written about this before, and wrote a proof-of-concept plugin that I dogfood on my own blog:
http://www.blahedo.org/botblock/
Two core ideas: 1) the truly hard thing for the computer is the language understanding. It's the question, not the computation, that's the problem. 2) Any site that becomes popular will be worth it to the spammers to hard-code, so any successful widely-deployed system needs to let the users add their own additional question templates.
Re: How to Smell Difference Between Humans & Robots - Annoying Captcha Forms
#6I've written about this before, and wrote a proof-of-concept plugin that I dogfood on my own blog: http://www.blahedo.org/botblock/ Two core ideas: 1) the truly hard thing for the computer is the language understanding. It's the question , not the computation , that's the problem. 2) Any site that becomes popular will be worth it to the spammers to hard-code, so any successful widely-deployed system needs to let the…
> the truly hard thing for the computer is the language understanding.
This does not just apply to understanding language. It applies to understanding and interpreting audio, images, videos, etc. Words and phrases are just the easiest to create in CAPTCHA's, but they are also getting easier for computers to solve. Quite a few of the CAPTCHA's on your blog could be solved by Wolfram Alpha (or at least close to). If it was used in masses, it wouldn't take long for hackers to perfect the process of answering them.
> so any successful widely-deployed system needs to let the users add their own additional question templates
Couldn't hackers take advantage of entering their own question templates? And relying on user-generated CAPTCHA's is extremely risky. Quality and consistency would drop to a level where the system would became almost useless.
Re: How to Smell Difference Between Humans & Robots - Annoying Captcha Forms
#7This is a great idea. The point is merely to provide an alternative to an explicit CAPTCHA that requires interaction like reCAPTCHA that doesn't cost less to try and break. That way, it's strictly more convenient to the user, if they use autofill or whatever, they'll just be subject to the ordinary reCAPTCHA that they would be anyway.
I'm imagining listening to mousemove on the document and doing something lightweight like appending the coordinates to an array onmousemove. Then a function that's setInterval'd every 2 seconds or something would flush the array to the server via XHR. A server-side script would, transparently to the user, analyze the mousetrail and if the user appeared to move their mouse realistically and took at least like a minute to fill out the form and took realistic amounts to type in text inputs and so on, the server will let them skip the reCAPTCHA.
Re: How to Smell Difference Between Humans & Robots - Annoying Captcha Forms
#8CloudFlare (https://www.cloudflare.com/) does something similar to this. It will present a CAPTCHA challenge page to users who have had suspicious activity within a certain period of time, according to Project Honeypot. If you want to be really stringent (at the cost of some false positives), it will also challenge people based on HTTP header analysis, and with a paid account they will also protect against XSS and SQL injection in POST requests.
They've done a fantastic job of cutting down the number of fake profiles on my client Set For Marriage (a dating site where it was a huge problem before), and the rest of their features are pretty good too (the asset caching has resulted in about 60% faster page load times).
Re: How to Smell Difference Between Humans & Robots - Annoying Captcha Forms
#9Shouldn't using something sensing the movement of a mouse cursor be enough as a captcha? If no mouse movement is detected, fall back to a text input captcha.
Re: How to Smell Difference Between Humans & Robots - Annoying Captcha Forms
#10Shouldn't using something sensing the movement of a mouse cursor be enough as a captcha? If no mouse movement is detected, fall back to a text input captcha.
Page opens, I press TAB to enter the form. Now I have to enter that stupid Captha again. And what about Tablet PC's? I'm not sure there is a lot of mouse movement there. But well maybe It could be enough for a lot of desktop users.