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Goodbye (Crummy) CAPTCHAs. Hello Ad Dollars?
- Timmy_C 16y agoWhat's going to happen if I'm asked to fill out a CAPTCHA like one of these while I am browsing with Adblock on?
- Timmy_C 16y agoWhen I saw the title of this article I thought it was going to be about removing CAPTCHAs in favor of higher conversion rates . . . even if it means more SPAM.
- jchonphoenix 16y agoI know the professor who created CAPTCHAs fairly well (did research with him) and I can say that these captcha's are missing the point of captcha's. The hard to read word is there to prevent spammers. With easy to read words, you have a limited number of words per a page. In the end, the probability that a program randomly guessing the assortment of words (O(n^2) combinations if we assume order) is actually quite high.
- mikemol 16y agoTried signing up for an account. They eat their own dogfood, for which I'm thankful. It looks like the advertisers can force you to click through to get the security code. (e.g. Catfish's "Click through to see the security code!") I'll pass.
- CTISN 16y agoFunny, I first noticed how they don't eat their own dogfood. They don't have a captcha on their contact form: http://www.solvemedia.com/contact.html http://www.solvemedia.com/contact.html. Seems to me like that would be a good place to have one.
- mikemol 16y agoThey have (or had; not checking again) one on their sign-up form. That they don't have one on their contact page suggests they don't know what CATPCHAs are for...
- almost 16y agoSo you replace the hard to read CAPTCHAs with easy to read ads. Of which presumably there will be a limited number in circulation at any one time. Sounds kinda easy to circumvent...
- aristidb 16y agoIndeed. Without some form of randomisation (which advertisers probably do not want), this would drastically lower the price of solving a captcha. Because you need to submit each ad to a human solver network only once, and can store the solution.
- mseebach 16y agoA longtime standing solution to hard-to-read captchas are easy to read (but hard to process) captchas. E.g. show a picture of an animal or a shape and ask what it is, or even just ask a simple math problem or riddle in writing. Problem with those are that they need to be constantly updated from a reliable source, or else, once the solution becomes popular, the spammer can bruteforce it in linear time (no matter how high N is, there are only N possible patterns). This seems to be an attempt at fixing this. Ads are often relatively short lived so by the time the spammer has them bruteforced, it might be out of circulation - and more importantly, there are new ads in. It's an armsrace, and this is a way to pay our troops. Also, it's trivial for advertisers to make many different variations (e.g. one for each sales bulletpoint), so there are many variations in circulation. Since there's often more textual content than the password in the ad, they're not prone to simple OCR, while still easy to comprehend for the user. Obvious shortcomings are if ads are not so shortlived, and if it's easy to identify and break classes of ads (e.g. if it's yellow and has the IE logo in position X, OCR area Y, done). Also, it's a bit of a dealbreaker if I'm forced to open and visit a website to get the password.
- olegk 16y agoYou have no idea what you're talking about. > show a picture of an animal or a shape and ask what it is, Ok, so let's say you come up with pictures of 20 different animals. A spam script that picks the same answer every time will have a 5% success rate. > or even just ask a simple math problem or riddle in writing. Computers are way better at solving most math problems than people.
- jarin 16y agoThe article isn't totally accurate, I tried it out and got a trailer for Devil. I would probably use this for media views or file downloads, but I wouldn't use it for signups because I think it would decrease conversions.
- uptown 16y agoI'll be happy with anything other than today's captcha solution. These are some captchas from my hall of fame: http://www.twitpic.com/2qbv0e/full http://www.twitpic.com/2qbv0e/full
- fourneau 16y agoCaptchas like these make me wonder if I'm a robot... I was a big fan of this new captcha idea until the video.
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- jncraton 16y agoThose CAPTCHAs really aren't that bad. If I understand how ReCAPTCHA works, you only need to get one of the words correct.
- zach 16y agoYou know that, I know that, but if everybody knows that you only have to enter the easier-to-read semi-nonsense word then ReCAPTCHA itself doesn't work so well for its larger purpose. And if you don't know that, then giving someone a CAPTCHA with Hebrew or a Rorschach inkblot in it when they're trying to buy Yo Gabba Gabba Live tickets for their four-year old is a surreal enough experience to make people think they're living in a situation comedy.
- mdolon 16y agoTheir sign up page required me to watch a video in order to get the security code. While the code came up a couple of seconds into the video, I still dislike the thought of having to watch and wait for ads to somehow contribute to a website (be it through comments, sign ups, etc).
- pacak 16y agoIE = Browse safer? I don't think so. Anyway, I am not going to leave comments on sites, which wants to turn my attention on useless junk like ads.
- tomjen3 16y agoDamn, that is both smart and evil (because the user can't ignore these kind of ads). What can we do to make sure this product doesn't catch on?
- hellweaver666 16y agoIf you don't want them to catch on, refuse to sign up to any service that uses them. Simple.
- msy 16y agoI spent a minute trying but no, I cannot think of anything that would make me go 'well fuck you' and go elsewhere faster then being expected to type out ad copy like a school child.
- pedalpete 16y agoand yet you will gladly type randomized and difficult to read letters or words? This is actually attempting to solve two problems at once, and in some ways it could be more interesting to the user if the ads are well targetted. Why not help the site owner make a bit of $$??? are you really afraid that typing in a bit of ad copy is going to turn you into a mindless drone
- melissamiranda 16y agoI'd rather type random characters than "Safer Browsing" for an IE ad. You have to consider the emotional reaction to these ads.
- Ilovepee 16y agoWhat about the refresh button?
- akadruid 16y agoYou've got the nail on the head. Capatcha publishing sites are already weeding out the idiots who will jump through hoops to join and blog comment argument or whatever it is - now they can sell the idiots to the highest bidder. Even if they get more spam, the idiot just earnt them cold hard cash in exchange for the spam, and you can still go back to solving spam the non-capatcha way. It's evil, but evil in a kind of clinically beautiful way. I'd say it stands a good chance of working in the short term too - like punch they monkey ads made a lot of money for some people back in the day
- tomjen3 16y agoIf the site owner is going to make money of that, then the only reason it is economically feasible to do so is if the brand owner gets at least that from the value of showing me their ad. The only way to do that is if it works. So yeah, I am concerned.
- niyazpk 16y agoYeah, this is exactly what I want - remind the user about some other brand in the exact same signup page where I should actually try hard to win him over. Not to mention how ridiculously easy it will be to break these limited edition captchas.
- notahacker 16y agoWorks just fine for a blogger that doesn't care too much whether you complete the captcha or not but likes the few extra bucks he makes on a well-commented blog entry.
- petsos 16y agoNot if the well-commented blog entry is 99% viagra comments.
- bl4k 16y agohere is the challenge I got when I signed up for the service: http://imgur.com/x5hoN.png http://imgur.com/x5hoN.png for the solution I put in 'stupid', and it worked this definitely doesn't solve the security considerations that captchas were designed for. Update: Ok so it didn't take long to break this thing. These guys have the plain text of the CAPTCHA in the document DOM. It isn't even an image - the CAPTCHA is rendered in javascript. See: http://imgur.com/9VO4J.png http://imgur.com/9VO4J.png The 'brand' logos are an image, but they are simple to OCR. So to break this CAPTCHA, simply hook v8 up to your auto-submit bot and interpret the JS that is being returned to you. You can't read it from the client because they serve that IFRAME from a diff domain - so they base their security on the browser x-domain policy. But that is all moot if you are building a bot, or if you build a browser extension that solves these things.
- StavrosK 16y agoAnd since this CAPTCHA isn't secure at all, they'll remove the security element altogether, making it a more annoying version of a banner ad.
- scrrr 16y agoIf successful this can be copied easily and successfully by anyone. But I hope it won't succeed. Instead things like openid should be more widespread so I don't have to enter a captcha in the first place.
- mmastrac 16y agoI don't often hope for entrepreneurs to fail, but I think this is a place where they are actually making the world worse. Not only do they completely fail at what they are trying to do (ie: prevent spam), but they do so in the most possibly annoying way. I'll gladly contribute my time towards writing browser extensions to hide and automatically solve these things if they take off.
- zentechen 16y agoPeople are making everything into an ad. Stop creating more junks!
- cobbal 16y agoIt seems to me that they're not attempting to prevent spam, they're merely trying to monetize what has become the standard practice of entering CAPTCHAs. going with something like this it's trading in spam prevention for cash. The legitimate users already expect to see a CAPTCHA, but you're using it for a different purpose
- mikeknoop 16y agoHow about this for a CAPTCHA, a video ad unit where the questions are akin to those old SCENEIT questions? Ie, what color shirt was the man pumping gas wearing? Bonus points if you tell the user the question after the video so they have to re-watch.
- metageek 16y agoI hate wasting my time on videos even when they're about things I'm interested in; I'm not going to use a service that forces me to watch one I'm not interested in.
- randomtask 16y agoThis sounds a lot like what Vidoop tried to do. Their initial idea was to replace passwords with an authentication mechanism based on selecting a number of pictures that fit into user-chosen categories. A person would select 3-5 images from a grid of 12 with each image belonging to a distinct category. Those who picked the images, in the correct order, corresponding to their chosen categories (selected on sign up to the service) along with their username was deemed authenticated. As far as I know they hoped to make money by selling ads within the categories, so if one of the categories displayed was "pets" you might see ads for petfood for example. They moved into doing captchas at some point too. Anyway, it seemed like a promising idea, but they folded last year. Good write up from a former employee here: http://factoryjoe.com/blog/2009/06/05/the-fall-of-vidoop/ http://factoryjoe.com/blog/2009/06/05/the-fall-of-vidoop/
- CTISN 16y agoVidoop was bought up by Confident Technologies, which is still doing the image-based captcha as well as image-based authentication for Web and mobile: www.ConfidentTechnologies.com. The free MyVidoop service is still around too.
- zabraxias 16y agoI think the idea is an excellent example of how to think creatively but it would take me a long time to find the ad version of a captcha since I would see it as an ad and ignore it. In any case I'll be watching their progress with this idea.
- dannyr 16y agoI had a similar idea a few years ago. I thought my idea was original but when I did my research, several companies have already thought of it. Microsoft http://www.internetnews.com/webcontent/article.php/3836421/Microsoft-Seeks-Patent-for-CAPTCHA-Based-Ads.htm http://www.internetnews.com/webcontent/article.php/3836421/M... Yahoo http://www.faqs.org/patents/app/20090012855 http://www.faqs.org/patents/app/20090012855 Ad Captcher http://adcaptcher.com/ http://adcaptcher.com/
- 9ec4c12949a4f3 16y agoThis is not a replacement for captchas.
- photon_off 16y agoNormally, I refrain from writing such bad things about start-ups and people's ideas, unless there is something really awful about it. In this case, it's obvious how terrible this service is, both in terms of how it treats the user (who wants to do you a favor by signing up) as a cow to be milked, and how the implementation of it does very little to solve the actual problem of spam. It's just a greedy and short-sighted idea. I won't write any more about how stupid it is. What I will note is that it is somewhat inspiring to see that an idea like this can get off the ground. I haven't dug into the details of "Solve Media", but I assume that some people poured a sum of money into this. Maybe there's a sucker born every minute, or maybe confidence in anything internet-related is just that high. Hopefully, both things are true, and I think that's a good thing. I'm not advocating taking suckers' money, but rather believing the following: If your idea is anything better than this, which it likely is, you have a shot at it.
- mikemol 16y agoUsers creating and using free accounts have costs associated with them. Those costs need to be met in order for the service to continue, either by tying a revenue model to the users directly, via charity, or by subsidizing their use of your resources by using something they contribute, such as content. Selling user content is not a stable net in proportion to user use of the site; you don't know that the content will continue to sell at a rate keeping pace with user-incurred costs. Charity is also not a stable net in proportion to user use of the site; nothing directly and reliably ties charity income to user-incurred cost, and nothing can--it's charity. The only way to meet proportionate cost incurred by user use is by tying a proportionate revenue to user use. Even if you don't charge a user to use the service, even if you only ask that they fill out a text box to use the site, just as they might with reCAPTCHa, it suddenly becomes 'milking the user'. Sadly, users no longer merely expect services to be free for them, they get offended if the service provider derives any money at all for their activity. (I think I sort of understand the mentality--"Why are they getting money for my work, when I'm not?"--but that logic doesn't hold up if no money was changing hands while they did the work anyway.) You're also rather vague about what "the actual problem of spam" is. What strikes you as a mere symptom, and what strikes you as a cause? Yes, these peoples' particular implementation of challenge-response is pretty poor. Is that what you were specifically referring to, or did you have something else in mind?
- agscala 16y agoWhat's wrong with recaptcha anyways? I actually like helping with translations of book scans.
- steilpass 16y agoThere is a German startup which has been doing this for quite some time: http://www.captchaad.com/ http://www.captchaad.com/
- ciupicri 16y agoThis is not a new idea. http://adcaptcher.com/ http://adcaptcher.com/ is at least one year old and it's already being used on a couple of sites.
- hkim 16y agoGuys, isn't ycombinator all about helping us become good entrepreneurs? Why tear down a good effort? How is this productive? These guys have serious supporters and cliemts so they have to be on to something