Re: Going from simple to super CAPTCHA

On 6/11/07, Robert Cummings <robert@interjinn.com> wrote:

On Mon, 2007-06-11 at 12:01 -0400, Robert Cummings wrote: On Mon, 2007-06-11 at 10:38 -0400, tedd wrote:

Gnag: I know we can beat this thing to death, as we have in previous threads and I don't anyone wants to travel previously traveled ground. However, Rob said: "A good captcha will try to exploit a computer's weaknesses." So, let's expound on that -- what do you consider to be a computer's weakness?

Well for instance as humans we can fairly easily recognize similar shapes. We can recognize an apple whether it is red, green, yellow, has a stem, has a leaf, is half eaten. A computer might recognize a circle, and might guess that the circle is an apple based on further analysis. But we as humans could recognize it as an apple even if we stretched it a bit so it was no longer circular, or as I said, if it was a crescent because someone had taken a huge bite out of it. This is something humans excel at... inferring information from similar previous experiences. Taking the image captcha to a different level, one could combine our ability to understand language as well as imagery. For instance we could have an icon repository of animals, vehicles, plants, etc (very obvious ones anyways). Then to create a captcha we could randomly select X icons, slightly morph them to spoof matching them within the captcha image itself, then ask:

    What animal do you see in the above picture?

I think someone already said microsoft or someone does something similar. The principle is that we know what generally constitutes an animal and a computer does not. Similarly, an audio complement would be to have a background sound of maybe low level radio chatter overlaid with the sounds of various everyday items... then one could ask:

    What did you hear ringing?

Possible answers... a bell, the telephone, an alarm, etc. The problem then becomes an issue of people who can't spell or are terrible at recognizing everyday things. I've just been inspired by my childhood... Sesame Street CAPTCHA...

    "Which of these things doesn't belong"

:) Cheers, Rob. -- .------------------------------------------------------------. | InterJinn Application Framework - http://www.interjinn.com | :------------------------------------------------------------: | An application and templating framework for PHP. Boasting | | a powerful, scalable system for accessing system services | | such as forms, properties, sessions, and caches. InterJinn |

| also provides an extremely flexible architecture for       |
| creating re-usable components quickly and easily.          |

`------------------------------------------------------------' -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php

Robert, I really like that idea. I'd suggest adding either radio buttons or a drop-down list of, say, four items.... but then there's a 25% chance that automated software could still get in, so in reality, it's only blocking 3/4 of the attempts at automation. Because otherwise, you'd have to have a cAsE-iNsEnSiTiVe regexp check (and possibly a database of common mis-spellings) to check against. -- Daniel P. Brown [office] (570-) 587-7080 Ext. 272 [mobile] (570-) 766-8107