Next-Generation CAPTCHA Exploits the Semantic Gap 327
captcha_fun writes "Researchers at Penn State have developed a patent-pending image-based CAPTCHA technology for next-generation computer authentication. A user is asked to pass two tests: (1) click the geometric center of an image within a composite image, and (2) annotate an image using a word selected from a list. These images shown to the users have fake colors, textures, and edges, based on a sequence of randomly-generated parameters. Computer vision and recognition algorithms, such as alipr, rely on original colors, textures, and shapes in order to interpret the semantic content of an image. Because of the endowed power of imagination, even without the correct color, texture, and shape information, humans can still pass the tests with ease. Until computers can 'imagine' what is missing from an image, robotic programs will be unable to pass these tests. The system is called IMAGINATION and you can try it out." This sounds promising given how broken current CAPTCHA technology is.
Too hard. (Score:5, Insightful)
This Captcha suffers from the same old problem. As Captchas get harder more humans will fail them.
*or annotate... or centre
Blind people? (Score:5, Insightful)
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The cost of being all-inclusive can be too high for some budgets.
Re:Blind people? (Score:5, Insightful)
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The same could be said for supporting minor browsers, such as Safari.
I believe that's why many web pages don't bother testing for compatibility with minor browsers, such as Safari.
Some sites (www.google.com, slashdot.org) can be adapted for use by the blind, so the admins need to consider them when incorporating a captcha. Others (images.google.com, www.hotmonkeylove.com) are inherently based for people with normal vision, so these image based captchas should be just fine.
Re:Blind people? (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Blind people? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Blind people? (Score:5, Insightful)
The Internet is becoming much too important to leave a significant amount of the population (pardon the pun) in the dark. We have the technology to help the blind navigate web sites independently. Unfortunately, CAPTCHAs are hindering much of that progress.
Re:Blind people? (Score:5, Insightful)
No, spammers are. The root problem of this "solution" is the spammers, who do not care our personal feelings of privacy. They don't care that their messages cause everyone else's costs to rise.
Without CAPTHA technology, none of the web mailers would be usable, as they would all be blocked by every known blacklist.
For this reason, I think the penalties for convicted spammers should be far higher than what they are now. Their actions are subverting the ease of use for a very large group of people.
Re:Blind people? (Score:5, Insightful)
Others are using letters / numbers that after distortion could be a,d,9,g for example.
Personal, I give a site two tries before I give up and dump them.
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I know I've said this before, but american spammers are the equivalent of the short-bus kids. They think they're doing well, but they are actually being rather ineffective and risking their necks when they don't have to.
Re:Blind people? (Score:5, Informative)
1. Strip links from messages. The spammers are trying to game Google's (and other search engine's) page ranking, and they can't do this if you don't allow them to post links. The incentive to spam your site has now gone.
2. Insert some primitive captcha. In my case this was just a question asking the user to add 2 small numbers together. The reason this step was necessary was because despite implementing step 1, I was still getting a huge amount of automated spam from spam bots which didn't realise there was no point in spamming my site. Once a human spammer realises you've added captcha he'll come and have a look to see how easy it is to circumvent (very easy in my case). However after running a test personally he'll see there's no point and (hopefully) remove you from his list of sites to spam.
Hope that helps anyone reading this...
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1. Strip links from messages. The spammers are trying to game Google's (and other search engine's) page ranking, and they can't do this if you don't allow them to post links. The incentive to spam your site has now gone.
This is exceedingly wishful thinking on your part. We already see sites that strictly add the nofollow to all links in comments so that any URLs in said comments are completely useless for building page rank and yet the spambots still deluge the sites with spam on a constant basis. (Or at least attempt to.) I've seen the same thing happen on sites that do exactly what you suggest. You see spambots trying to use BBCode to link URLs in places that obviously don't use it, and so on. Spambots are automat
Re:Blind people? (Score:4, Insightful)
No, the point of a CAPTCHA is to have a test which a human can pass easily, but a computer can't. Most current CAPTCHAs are image-based, since that is simple to implement, but this is by no means a requirement.
Re:Blind people? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Blind people? (Score:4, Insightful)
Think about it. What is the cost of making a car that a blind person could drive? Prohibitive, I suspect. Given the current state of technology it may not be quite possible even (though we could pay for human chauffeurs if we were really determined).
What's the cost of making a printed newspaper accessible to a blind person? Quite high I suspect. The technology to read shapes on a page and convert them to something the blind person can read or listen to is not straighforward.
What's the cost of a system that allows a blind person to access text stored electronically on a computer? Pretty-much negligible.
The thing is, the web should be a superb medium for making its content accessible to practically everyone. The information is already in a form that computers can manipulate easily.
If you use HTML as it was designed to be used, there is no additional cost in making it accessible.
Come on people, this is not rocket science! Here we have a golden opportunity to make, for practically no additional cost, something that can be accessed by everyone. It's not like designing a driverless car, or backfitting access ramps and lifts to historic buildings. Why on earth wouldn't we do this?
</rant>
Re:Blind people? (Score:5, Interesting)
{SNIPPED}
What's the cost of a system that allows a blind person to access text stored electronically on a computer? Pretty-much negligible.
First, creating content is not negligible in cost.
Second, creating an interface to deliver the content is not Negligable in cost.
Third, Actually delivering the content to the masses isn't negligible in cost either.
Fourth, as has been pointed out in other comments and in the article, the problem involves the creation of a technology that will allow your audience to access the content/service you are providing, while simultaneously preventing the use of automated systems to exploit your services by appearing to be your audience (i.e. a Human), because the failure to do so means that you may lose the entire technology, or at the very least render it substantially less useful and more expensive. Email, for example, is only being used 5% of the time as intended, the other 95% being spam (As seen on
If you use HTML as it was designed to be used, there is no additional cost in making it accessible.
if you are using HTML only, the whole captcha debate is meaningless for you. HTML is designed for PUBLISHING information, captcha applies to web based applications that HTML is only a SMALL part of. After all, the only interactive part of HTML are the form elements. Since YOU aren't actually doing anything with the posted form information, YOU have no need for security and little to no need to verify that the entity on the other end of that pipe is a human, spyder, or spambot.
However, some of us do create applications that need to know this, because we want to provide services for actual humans, but do not want to provide another place for spambots to send out their crap.
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Email, for example, is only being used 5% of the time as intended, the other 95% being spam
CAPTCHAs are a strange way to solve the problem anyway. A lot of spammy accounts (particularly wiki spam accounts) are signed up by humans.
The thing is though that spammers have to access the net from an IP address. Sure, they use grandma's compromised computer so they effectively have thousands of IPs, but they still access from an IP. So score the IP addresses. When spam comes from them, knock them dow
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But the cost is the same whether you are making it accessible or not.
But the cost is the same whether you are making it accessible or not.
But the cost is the same whether you are making it accessible or not.
In case yo
Regarding your sig (Score:4, Funny)
"You stole my sig!"
"No I didn't."
"Yes you did, it's exactly the same as mine!"
"No it isn't."
"Yes it is!"
"No it isn't. Look, mine is in two lines."
"That hardly makes a difference."
"Yes it does!"
"No it doesn't."
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In the defense of many, I've seen some captcha's so distorted that I can't even make out the damn words/letters within it. I welcome a new method like this, but I'm suspecting that it will eventually be beaten as well.
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You can see? Fine, your browser renders that information as text that you can read on your screen.
You can't see? Fine, your browser renders that information as speech that you read hear via your speakers/headphones.
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The blind and hard-of-sight have always been poorly served by what is a very visual medium.
This is not true, I once worked for a genius of an architect at a very large organisation - he was blind and told me that the web had opened up whole new avenues of access to research material that was not available as braille from the library etc. he used to clatter away on a braille 'screen' accessing google and so on.
I've said it on slashdot a few times, but I had to change a large banking authentication system in the UK from using CAPTCHA because the RNIB basically said that any large UK company
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Far to many 'drivers' think they can do whatever they like as long as they don't get caught. As other have pointed out - spammers are the root cause. OTOH: The arms race has created some interesting technology.
Don't forget users of lynx (Score:5, Interesting)
Lynx is the geek slacker's greatest tool, when run in an ssh session from your home server, not only is the traffic unloggable (except for "he's calling home a bit") but it even looks like work to the uninitiated.
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My point kinda still stands, I'm sure there are people in the world who still use it. It's good for cutting bandwidth usage down to almost zero too.
Re:Don't forget users of lynx (Score:4, Insightful)
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The general public will not know what "geometric" means*.
This Captcha suffers from the same old problem. As Captchas get harder more humans will fail them.
*or annotate... or centre
Re:Too hard. (Score:5, Insightful)
To be optimistic, I actually like to think of it the other way around:
CAPTCHAs are providing a valuable evolutionary pressure on machine vision/artificial intelligence development!
=Smidge=
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To be optimistic, I actually like to think of it the other way around: CAPTCHAs are providing a valuable evolutionary pressure on machine vision/artificial intelligence development!
... so when the machines decide to exterminate us, camouflage clothing will be of no use to us.
Welcoming our seeing and intelligent machine overlords seems futile. We will be exterminated.
Thanks. Now I'm depressed.
/me goes off to his Computational Linguistics class. Guess the overlords will understand language as well.
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The only challenge is how to get you to pay.
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The whole thing is cleverly d
Re:Too hard. (Score:5, Interesting)
This Captcha suffers from the same old problem. As Captchas get harder more humans will fail them.
*or annotate... or centre
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Oh, gimme a freaking break. I am sooooo sick of everyone worrying about pandering to the lowest common denominator. But I have a solution to this particular problem.
Here's my plan: cleanse the gene pool. We'll just eliminate warning labels from everything and when the stupid freaking idiots fry themselves blow-drying their hair in the bathtub because there was no warning label on the hair dryer saying "WARNING: RISK OF DEATH!!! DO NOT USE IN O
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That is a cool project, but in all fairness that CAPTCHA probably works for the same reason "the Mac has no viruses". That is, it is so little used that spammers have focused their efforts on bigger targets. Thus an inherently less secure system can be less likely to be broken.
As as example, since the Asirra project takes its photos from Petfinder.com, all a spammer has to do is scrape all the Petfinder photos and categorize them by what words (e.g. "cat" vs "dog") are near by in the HTML. Once this d
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That a Captcha is the only thing standing between a gmail account and the ability to send large numbers of spam messages is more of the problem. Run the spam filters on outgoing messages and delay some of them to give time for the new address
curses... (Score:4, Funny)
worthless (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:worthless (Score:5, Funny)
This is where it falls apart... (Score:3, Insightful)
It's been threatened and talked about before, all it needs is something "unbreakable" like this to actually make it happen.
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It's been threatened and talked about before, all it needs is something "unbreakable" like this to actually make it happen.
Lyrical Response Mechanism (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Lyrical Response Mechanism (Score:4, Funny)
Then it will be hilarious.
Re:Lyrical Response Mechanism (Score:5, Funny)
"Never gonna give you up"...
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Never gonna give you up
Never gonna say goodbye
Start Talking Love, Magnum
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I'm never, ever gonna stop
Not the way I feel about you
Girl, I just can't live without you
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Ain't never gonna let you down babe
Ain't never gonna give you up
Hey hey hey hey
Yea yea yea
Ain't never gonna give you up
Yea yea yea
Ain't never gonna let you down
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It's still trivially crackable. (Score:5, Insightful)
Then there's also the option of paying Warcraft gold farmers to solve captchas and take a break from the game.
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(Also, said trivia questions will be applicable only to one specific site, so it would never pay for the spammers to build a database of them.)
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Re:It's still trivially crackable. (Score:5, Interesting)
But really, as long as you have an authentication method which is significantly hard/unique, you'll be safe. Spamming is a "low hanging fruit" operation. Quantity over qualify, 90% of the time. In fact, the answer to killing off spambots might very well be everyone designing their own authentication. Right now, there are a half-dozen major ones. Crack one, and you have access to millions of places. If instead there were thousands, the time required to break one would not necessarily be worth the money you could get from doing it.
Our forums are not worth programming the automated bots to crack, so we're 100% spam free now, for the first time in a few years. It's not a hard authentication - just different from 99.9% of the rest of them. Hell, most people could answer "what color is this page", even if they had to look at the raw html and google the color hex. But for one page, it's not worth programming a bot to do. Unique authentication methods will kill spambots.
Slashdotted (Score:2)
speach synthasis. (Score:2)
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Re:Illogical (Score:4, Insightful)
It is imaginable to create a model that describes speech characteristics in general and computer speech characteristics in particular. Any sound sample could compared with the two models. If it fits the wider speech model but not the computer speech model, then you would call it human speech. QED.
The ability to distinquish between two things does not imply that you'll be able to generate them effectively (unless the search space is very narrow). Imagine it this way: you can probably distinguish Chinese from Spanish. That does not imply you speak either language.
Alternative... (Score:5, Informative)
Stupid Captcha (Score:5, Insightful)
20 minutes, test not yet passed.. (Score:2, Funny)
Test site slashdotted... (Score:4, Informative)
Slashdotted (Score:2)
That's what you think...
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Halp! (Score:2)
The real solution to captcha is OpenID. (Score:2, Informative)
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Re:The real solution to captcha is OpenID. (Score:4, Insightful)
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mechanical turk (Score:3, Interesting)
CAPTCHA = The terrorists have won. (Score:3, Insightful)
How is CAPTCHA broken and how is it "technology"?
It is not broken because it works as it is suppose to. I would think the correct term would be "solved" or "been overcome".
Technology-wise, CAPTCHA is a workaround, not a solution. The real problem is automated bots manipulating forms where the webmaster only wants humans. Detecting whether or not the visitor is an automaton would be the solution, but because people have apparently given up on this, they have resorted to trying to detect whether or not the visitor is human.
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Gerry
Here's a reference implementation (Score:4, Funny)
I think RapidShare has a good one (Score:2)
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It says select 4 letters (when there are numbers and letters)..
Then took me a while to realise there were cats and dogs.. i thought it was just random.
Other bad part about it was that there was a 30 second delay inbetween each attempt!
i think its too big (Score:3, Insightful)
Sweatshops (Score:2, Insightful)
At least a part is Ineffective (Score:5, Insightful)
This is no better, and may be worse, than what we have now, for two reasons.
1) If you fill in the gaps programmatically, and then make the image grayscale, you probably have something you can use for image matching.
2) Much more severely: The interface reduces the number of possible answers by multiple orders of magnitude. For the one I saw I think there were 10 or 15 answers. Even if you kick image recognition to the curb and randomly choose an answer, you'll be right 1/15 times. It'd be trivial to write a program to harvest hundreds of accounts in a day by just picking random answers. Hand that off to a botnet or similar, and this becomes a minor speedbump.
~D
Email is broken and we need to dump it ASAP (Score:2)
Why do we need CAPTCHA? Because people sign for email accounts to spam people with their crap.
Why is spam possible in the first place? Because the email system wasn't designed with abusers in mind. Email is broken and we need to dump it ASAP and replace it with something else.
Unfortunately I don't have the answer, but that doesn't mean my point is invalid. Surely there has to be a solution, someone somewhere will think of something.
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As soon as there is people involved, you have to assume that a lot of them are idiots and a lot of them will abuse your system. Build in consequence.
Email doesn't work (abused), spam is wasting bandwidth world-wide, we need to put a stop to it.
And please, whoever comes up with the solution... choose a better name than "Email 2.0"...
I for one (Score:3, Insightful)
Solution: unproven users = limited access (Score:5, Insightful)
If free mail servers put restrictions on what new accounts could do, with an override to anyone who is willing to go to a lot of trouble to prove they are human, it would short-circuit the spammer problem.
If Yahoo, Gmail, etc. all limited you to 10 outgoing mail recipients a day until you had both 1) had the service for 1 day and replied to 10 messages, AND limited you to 100 outgoing mail recipients a day until you signed up to be a "high volume sender," it would cut most spammers off at the knees. Depending on the service, being a "high volume sender" may involve turning over a credit card number and may not be free. Some services may give "loyalty awards" to long-term customers by removing this restriction for people who have had their accounts for 6 months and show a heavy non-spammy ad-revenue-generating usage pattern.
Captcha solution (Score:2)
What's nice it that there are a few good libraries for speaking flash text as well, so an audio option is possible as well.
http://www.dracon.biz/captcha.php [dracon.biz]
Couldn't figure it out (Score:3, Insightful)
The answer is "Slashdotting", but where do I type it? I can't figure this CAPTCHA out...
advancing AI (Score:3, Funny)
hotcaptcha (Score:5, Interesting)
http://www.hotcaptcha.com/ [hotcaptcha.com]
Re:Twofo Ghey Niggers (Score:5, Funny)
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Not just entertaining, also educational!. (Score:2)
I first ever was in contact with a 419 via postal mail.
yes, 419 scams used to be pulled via the postal service.... international stamps the whole bit.
I admit- I was intrigued (and naive) and did nothing.. sounds too good to be true etc,, but I thought about it a whole lot.
Since then, and before the prevalance of 419 emails,
I've seen more than a few news stories about people getting into hot water for believing
now that 419 email is so widespread, and the topic so widely known
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Re:Can't RTFA. Already /.'ed after just ONE commen (Score:2)