It's so bot safe that even a human can't solve this!
Finally a good way to keep potential Customers from using your product!
Maptcha: An Experiment in Map-Based CAPTCHA
21–30 of 31 posts
Re: Maptcha: An Experiment in Map-Based CAPTCHA
#22It's good that there's effort going into improving captchas but IMO the big issue is finding something that also works for users with poor or no sight.
Re: Maptcha: An Experiment in Map-Based CAPTCHA
#23At OpenStreetMap we would love a map-based CAPTCHA that actually contributes to our map. Right now we (like most people) use ReCAPTCHA on our wiki... which has the rather exasperating effect of contributing map data (StreetView house numbers) to our main competitor, Google.
On the upside, you can usually type a wrong number into the ReCAPTCHA. ;)
Re: Maptcha: An Experiment in Map-Based CAPTCHA
#24It's so bot safe that even a human can't solve this! Finally a good way to keep potential Customers from using your product!
Yeah I got around a 50% success rate, maybe I'm just more robot than man these days :(
Re: Maptcha: An Experiment in Map-Based CAPTCHA
#25Order shouldn't matter for the result. ie: 3ypg1 should be just as valid as 3pyg1. Not everyone scans images top-left, going right, to bottom-right.
This might have been my downfall too, personally it was more of a scan over the entire image and type letters as I see satellite images, didn't even notice I was doing it like that until I saw your comment. I read something a while back how "left brain hemisphere" people scan sequentially and "right hemisphere" people jump in to find things at random. I can't speak for its accuracy or its place in reality but the end result is that this thing could do with accepting values in any order.
Not sure if that'd make the whole thing less useful however..
Re: Maptcha: An Experiment in Map-Based CAPTCHA
#26The first example is not indicative of the actual difficulty because the letters are pink (this is noted, but still). Beyond that, the examples use extremely hard to see letters... that completely defeats the purpose. There's no need if the challenging part for the computer is detecting satellite imagery. There are multiple letters on some of the images, sometimes hovering between two images. Again, why? The computer…
In fact (and I can't believe I didn't think of this before, why have letters at all?!? The user has to scan over the images then go back to the text field and enter in characters. Why not just click to select?
Re: Maptcha: An Experiment in Map-Based CAPTCHA
#27I like how you are thinking outside the box a bit. Having said that, there are a couple of issues: 1) This is really not a hard problem for a computer to solve. Detecting different image types is pretty trivial. You made it a lot easier by making the letters sit in the boxes in a regular manner. 2) A high percentage of captchas are now broken by humans, instead of robots. This is not a problem you will likely encount…
(2) Could be looked up by someone easily, and could potentially turn foreign readers/customers off for no good reason. I think you're better off just banning IPs. You can get a blacklist to start if you're really worried about it.
IP banning usually doesn't work, since that was the first countermeasure employed.
The captcha farms got a lot better at using large proxies/gateways to hide their traffic.
Re: Maptcha: An Experiment in Map-Based CAPTCHA
#28Hi everybody, designer here. I really appreciate all the feedback; this concept is still in its infancy and can obviously use quite a bit of improvement, but I'm trying to tweak it as best I can to maximize its usability.
Couple of notes: 1. The ultimate intention is to either pull images (both satellite and decoy) from the web as they are needed or create a database of images and update it regularly. Thus identifying images as real or decoy will only work on a short-term basis; there will always be new images entering the fold.
2. If people like this concept well enough to keep at it, I'm planning to automate some kind of color-matching scheme so that it's not possible to just look at the histograms of the images and identify the satellite images thusly.
3. I'm only just starting to learn about OCR, so at this moment I have no idea whether it's worth bothering to disguise letters or even whether it's worth using letters at all. I prefer having a two-tiered approach; having to ID a satellite image AND identify characters. If the bots are too good at identifying the characters and/or it's too hard for humans, that just leaves the satellite question and from what I've read that's not a high enough level of entropy.
4. I don't have anything lined up for an audio solution just yet. I'm fooling around with a few concepts, but nothing worth mentioning just yet.
5. Thanks to all those who wrote in suggestions/solutions and signed up!
Re: Maptcha: An Experiment in Map-Based CAPTCHA
#29At OpenStreetMap we would love a map-based CAPTCHA that actually contributes to our map. Right now we (like most people) use ReCAPTCHA on our wiki... which has the rather exasperating effect of contributing map data (StreetView house numbers) to our main competitor, Google. On the upside, you can usually type a wrong number into the ReCAPTCHA. ;)
I'd love to help - drop me a line at zack@asetniop.com and maybe I can help devise a method that can fulfill both your aims.
Re: Maptcha: An Experiment in Map-Based CAPTCHA
#30Order shouldn't matter for the result. ie: 3ypg1 should be just as valid as 3pyg1. Not everyone scans images top-left, going right, to bottom-right.
This might have been my downfall too, personally it was more of a scan over the entire image and type letters as I see satellite images, didn't even notice I was doing it like that until I saw your comment. I read something a while back how "left brain hemisphere" people scan sequentially and "right hemisphere" people jump in to find things at random. I can't speak for its accuracy or its place in reality but the end…
I don't think that would make it less useful; either the bot reads it right or it doesn't, the leeway introduced by allowing any order input is miniscule, I think. So I updated it so it won't get fussy about order.