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It's a real problem online - scripts that pretend to be human doing nefarious things like joining forums to post spam, or posting comment spam in blogs, or - well, you get the idea.
The usual Turing test is some text string overlaid on a swirly image: the theory says that a 'bot can't read the numbers in the image, so it fails. But OCR is good, and they're gradually getting through. The buggers.
Enter a new idea: Kittens. Wuvly fluffy little kittens. They're not very heavy. And they're very easy for you or me to identify. But a computer has trouble recognising a face at all, never mind distinguishing between kittens, puppies, gerbils, ponies and the like. So instead of "enter this text", you could be greeted with "click three kittens" and a 3x3 grid of cute animal tiles.
You may love kittens (aw, [i]kittens[/i]!) or hate them, but you can easily identify them - only cold unfeeling machines will have trouble spotting them. Et voila, the spambots, replicants and Cylons are excluded from your forums.
Full blurb from the KittenAuth people themselves: http://www.thepcspy.com/articles/security/the_cutest_humantest_kittenauth
(And of course, you could use the same idea with "click three ravens" or "click three conical sorts of effort", and on failure you could increase the difficulty of the test by increasing the grid size and target items)
The usual Turing test is some text string overlaid on a swirly image: the theory says that a 'bot can't read the numbers in the image, so it fails. But OCR is good, and they're gradually getting through. The buggers.
Enter a new idea: Kittens. Wuvly fluffy little kittens. They're not very heavy. And they're very easy for you or me to identify. But a computer has trouble recognising a face at all, never mind distinguishing between kittens, puppies, gerbils, ponies and the like. So instead of "enter this text", you could be greeted with "click three kittens" and a 3x3 grid of cute animal tiles.
You may love kittens (aw, [i]kittens[/i]!) or hate them, but you can easily identify them - only cold unfeeling machines will have trouble spotting them. Et voila, the spambots, replicants and Cylons are excluded from your forums.
Full blurb from the KittenAuth people themselves: http://www.thepcspy.com/articles/security/the_cutest_humantest_kittenauth
(And of course, you could use the same idea with "click three ravens" or "click three conical sorts of effort", and on failure you could increase the difficulty of the test by increasing the grid size and target items)
