6 ms·

Areyouhuman: A Great Capcha Alternative

42 points by jsherry 14y ago

Flenser 14y ago
It costs less than $0.01 to pay a real human to solve a capcha. Capcha's don't solve the underlying problem.
eddie_the_head 14y ago
One of the main points of reCAPTCHA is to help digitize books, newspapers and old time radio shows. Everytime you use reCAPTCHA, you're helping in this effort. I agree this is a nice alternative if it works for people not using reCAPTCHA but it'd be nice if more people would also use reCAPTCHA on their sites. Yes, it's free. http://www.google.com/recaptcha/learnmore http://www.google.com/recaptcha/learnmore http://www.google.com/recaptcha/whyrecaptcha http://www.google.com/recaptcha/whyrecaptcha
- esalazar 14y ago
  I agree that reCAPTCHA's mission is a noble one. That being said, it is REALLY annoying sometimes. I think even solutions that contribute to a noble cause will fall to easier and more intuitive ones (if they exist of course). Not that I necessarily think this is the answer, but a step in the right direction.
  - twelvechairs 14y ago
    I'm not sure I can agree its 'noble'. Are the resulting digitisations going to be free to access for everyone? Is the OCR algorithm that I am helping to create? No. While it may use your time to 'do something useful' - which is nice, that something is also to Google's competitive advantage - so its really more good business sense than noble (to me at least)....
    - eddie_the_head 14y ago
      Yes, the resulting digitizations are free to everyone, they are old newspapers like old NYT issues and books whose copyright has expired and are now in the public domain. How do you think you are able to search for so many old books pre-digital age on Google Books and read digital versions of old NYT news articles?
      - twelvechairs 14y ago
        If this is true, why don't they say it on their website? why is there no link to the material created? The only digitised versions of the NYT articles I can find on the web are on the NYT website, and you have to pay for them (at least, if you want the first paragraph)... Can you provide me with some proof of what you say (links to free versions of the NYT for example)? Because I'm afraid I'm having a hard time believing it.
loopdoend 14y ago
This won't work. The puzzle possibilities are limited. This is about as effective as asking a random question, it stops bots because they don't know how to deal with it. It wouldn't have a chance against a targeted spam campaign/attack. It's cute though.
- tokenizer 14y ago
  Could you please go into more detail? I'm curious because if you're saying a bot would be stopped at this solution, but not a human, then wouldn't that also apply to recaptcha as well? Or are you saying one could automate a solution around this over that being impossible with recaptcha? Would like to hear you thoughts.
  - walexander 14y ago
    This is fairly trivial to break. The number of puzzles are low and they repeat. I could refresh til I get a desired puzzle (shoe matching). Then write a simple cursor controller program (say using Java Robot API). It would scan across the static shoe area on the right looking at shoe colors. Then scan across the shoes on the left. When it matches a color shoe, drag across to match.
    - ElbertF 14y ago
      There's no need to control the cursor, you can just replay the request. Open up Firebug, solve a puzzle and capture the POST data being transmitted to the server: observation_data: {"observationNumber":3,"mouse":[{"x":1,"y":68,"down":false},{"{"observationNumber":3,"mouse":[{"x":1,"y":68,"down":false},{"x":1,"y":68,"down":false},{"x":1,"y":68,"down":false},{"x":1,"y":68,"down":false},{"x":1,"y":68,"down":false},{"x":1,"y":68,"down":false},{"x":1,"y":68,"down":false},{"x":1,"y":68,"down":false},{"x":2,"y":55,"down":false},{"x":34,"y":50,"down":false},{"x":40,"y":51,"down":false},{"x":40,"y":52,"down":false},{"x":40,"y":52,"down":false},{"x":40,"y":52,"down":false},{"x":40,"y":52,"down":false},{"x":40,"y":52,"down":true},{"x":40,"y":52,"down":true},{"x":108,"y":52,"down":true},{"x":242,"y":50,"down":true},{"x":327,"y":52,"down":true},{"x":336,"y":52,"down":true},{"x":336,"y":52,"down":true},{"x":336,"y":52,"down":true},{"x":336,"y":52,"down":true},{"x":336,"y":52,"down":true},{"x":336,"y":52,"down":true},{"x":336,"y":52,"down":true},{"x":336,"y":52,"down":true},{"x":336,"y":52,"down":true}],"clock":[16555,16597,16636,16677,16723,16755,16797,16837,16877,16917,16957,16996,17036,17075,17116,17157,17198,17236,17277,17319,17357,17396,17438,17476,17517,17557,17598,17638,17677],"bins":[[{"id":2,"time":14037}],[{"id":3,"time":16156},{"id":4,"time":17677}],[{"id":4,"time":17677}]],"items":[]}
rdoherty 14y ago
Interesting idea of challenging people/bots to complete higher-level tasks to prove they are human. This just needs keyboard accessibility (I couldn't tab to the start button or handicap symbol link).
metabren 14y ago
This may not be such a great alternative — it allows far too many attempts which make it susceptible to cracking. (a video showing this being beaten by a bot [1] was posted on HN [2] last week) [1] http://spamtech.co.uk/software/cracking-the-areyouhuman-captcha/ http://spamtech.co.uk/software/cracking-the-areyouhuman-capt... [2] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4025791 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4025791
hundchenkatze 14y ago
Here is a youtube video showing that some of the puzzles can be beaten pretty quickly through brute force. http://youtu.be/Ahu3fvW2H0E http://youtu.be/Ahu3fvW2H0E
slantyyz 14y ago
I have mixed feelings about captchas. As someone who works in tech, I realize it's a somewhat effective solution to a very difficult problem, but as a user, I just hate them. Captchas are like the "customs check" you have to pass to leave a Best Buy. Because of a few bad apples, everyone's customer experience suffers a little.
- tokenizer 14y ago
  I agree. After looking at all of these comments, it's safe to say this isn't ready to be a recaptcha alternative, but I do appreciate the attempt at making it a better process for the average user.
jsdalton 14y ago
Seems like the "accessibility" alternative is the weakest link here --- easily defeated with simple voice recognition technology.
- gridspy 14y ago
  I am so glad that I don't have to solve audio CAPTCHAs. That was traumatic!
comex 14y ago
Unfortunately I automatically associate this with "punch the monkey" banner ads and the like; if I saw it on a registration page I think I might skip it without thinking.
mhd 14y ago
First one I got was American-style pancakes, where I was supposed to put syrup and butter on it. Now due to partaking in way too much pop culture, I knew what to do. But while pancakes are pretty common, not everyone eats small, thick ones, stacked to incredible heights and thus is able to recognize them. Never mind the syrup, which is basically as international as a PB&J sandwich. That's the problem with iconography in general. Easily outdated or subject to i18n goofs.
- daeken 14y ago
  This is off-topic, but are PB&J sandwiches really not a common thing outside of the US? I've never heard this before.
  - taybenlor 14y ago
    They are not common outside of the US. Whenever I see people eat them in films and TV Shows I think "Ewww". Surprise, not everywhere is the same.
  - mhd 14y ago
    Peanut butter is pretty rare outside of the US. I think the Dutch have it as a "native" product and it's been getting more popular as a "typical American" import. Basically the roles of peanut butter and Nutella are reversed in large parts of Europe.
fchollet 14y ago
Some critical limitations: - Limited puzzle possibilities, making it possible to manually code a simple solver for each specific problem - culture-specific puzzles (I got "how to make pancakes") will cause some confusion among non-US users - more time-wasting & confusing (and therefore more annoying) than Captcha - relatively heavy to load
- SCdF 14y ago
  I wrote out basically the exact same points (including the pancakes) and then thought to check the rest of the thread.. The one you didn't mention is that it's not great people with older browsers or impaired / older people in general.
kwamenum86 14y ago
First of all, technically this is a CAPTCHA still. Second of all, you can eliminate the vast majority (or sometimes all) of your spam using honeypots much simpler CAPTCHAS like "what is four + 2?".
wbillingsley 14y ago
Ineffective at preventing bots and also ineffective at letting humans through reliably: Good luck to those with accessibility needs (elderly, blind, etc) in catching those moving glyphs... No more vegetarians visiting your site (after all if they don't put pepperoni on their pizzas they must be robots...) The bot-writers meanwhile can write code for each puzzle (the puzzles, requiring art assets, are expensive enough to generate that the many spammers can out-muscle the few areyouhuman puzzle-setters)
SeoxyS 14y ago
The solution to captcha annoyance is not more annoyance in the form of a spammy-looking game. You can get to 99% of the use cases using some simple javascript logic and a hidden form element that is invisible to the user and catch the rest using a solid spam-detection algorithm on the server. The solution to spam is not to annoy your users. At least reCAPTCHA helps transcribe books…

42 points by jsherry 14y ago

It costs less than $0.01 to pay a real human to solve a capcha. Capcha's don't solve the underlying problem.

One of the main points of reCAPTCHA is to help digitize books, newspapers and old time radio shows. Everytime you use reCAPTCHA, you're helping in this effort. I agree this is a nice alternative if it works for people not using reCAPTCHA but it'd be nice if more people would also use reCAPTCHA on their sites. Yes, it's free. http://www.google.com/recaptcha/learnmore http://www.google.com/recaptcha/learnmore http://www.google.com/recaptcha/whyrecaptcha http://www.google.com/recaptcha/whyrecaptcha

esalazar 14y ago
I agree that reCAPTCHA's mission is a noble one. That being said, it is REALLY annoying sometimes. I think even solutions that contribute to a noble cause will fall to easier and more intuitive ones (if they exist of course). Not that I necessarily think this is the answer, but a step in the right direction.
- twelvechairs 14y ago
  I'm not sure I can agree its 'noble'. Are the resulting digitisations going to be free to access for everyone? Is the OCR algorithm that I am helping to create? No. While it may use your time to 'do something useful' - which is nice, that something is also to Google's competitive advantage - so its really more good business sense than noble (to me at least)....
  - eddie_the_head 14y ago
    Yes, the resulting digitizations are free to everyone, they are old newspapers like old NYT issues and books whose copyright has expired and are now in the public domain. How do you think you are able to search for so many old books pre-digital age on Google Books and read digital versions of old NYT news articles?
    - twelvechairs 14y ago
      If this is true, why don't they say it on their website? why is there no link to the material created? The only digitised versions of the NYT articles I can find on the web are on the NYT website, and you have to pay for them (at least, if you want the first paragraph)... Can you provide me with some proof of what you say (links to free versions of the NYT for example)? Because I'm afraid I'm having a hard time believing it.

loopdoend 14y ago

This won't work. The puzzle possibilities are limited. This is about as effective as asking a random question, it stops bots because they don't know how to deal with it. It wouldn't have a chance against a targeted spam campaign/attack. It's cute though.

tokenizer 14y ago
Could you please go into more detail? I'm curious because if you're saying a bot would be stopped at this solution, but not a human, then wouldn't that also apply to recaptcha as well? Or are you saying one could automate a solution around this over that being impossible with recaptcha? Would like to hear you thoughts.
- walexander 14y ago
  This is fairly trivial to break. The number of puzzles are low and they repeat. I could refresh til I get a desired puzzle (shoe matching). Then write a simple cursor controller program (say using Java Robot API). It would scan across the static shoe area on the right looking at shoe colors. Then scan across the shoes on the left. When it matches a color shoe, drag across to match.
  - ElbertF 14y ago
    There's no need to control the cursor, you can just replay the request. Open up Firebug, solve a puzzle and capture the POST data being transmitted to the server: observation_data: {"observationNumber":3,"mouse":[{"x":1,"y":68,"down":false},{"{"observationNumber":3,"mouse":[{"x":1,"y":68,"down":false},{"x":1,"y":68,"down":false},{"x":1,"y":68,"down":false},{"x":1,"y":68,"down":false},{"x":1,"y":68,"down":false},{"x":1,"y":68,"down":false},{"x":1,"y":68,"down":false},{"x":1,"y":68,"down":false},{"x":2,"y":55,"down":false},{"x":34,"y":50,"down":false},{"x":40,"y":51,"down":false},{"x":40,"y":52,"down":false},{"x":40,"y":52,"down":false},{"x":40,"y":52,"down":false},{"x":40,"y":52,"down":false},{"x":40,"y":52,"down":true},{"x":40,"y":52,"down":true},{"x":108,"y":52,"down":true},{"x":242,"y":50,"down":true},{"x":327,"y":52,"down":true},{"x":336,"y":52,"down":true},{"x":336,"y":52,"down":true},{"x":336,"y":52,"down":true},{"x":336,"y":52,"down":true},{"x":336,"y":52,"down":true},{"x":336,"y":52,"down":true},{"x":336,"y":52,"down":true},{"x":336,"y":52,"down":true},{"x":336,"y":52,"down":true}],"clock":[16555,16597,16636,16677,16723,16755,16797,16837,16877,16917,16957,16996,17036,17075,17116,17157,17198,17236,17277,17319,17357,17396,17438,17476,17517,17557,17598,17638,17677],"bins":[[{"id":2,"time":14037}],[{"id":3,"time":16156},{"id":4,"time":17677}],[{"id":4,"time":17677}]],"items":[]}

rdoherty 14y ago

Interesting idea of challenging people/bots to complete higher-level tasks to prove they are human. This just needs keyboard accessibility (I couldn't tab to the start button or handicap symbol link).

metabren 14y ago

This may not be such a great alternative — it allows far too many attempts which make it susceptible to cracking. (a video showing this being beaten by a bot [1] was posted on HN [2] last week) [1] http://spamtech.co.uk/software/cracking-the-areyouhuman-captcha/ http://spamtech.co.uk/software/cracking-the-areyouhuman-capt... [2] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4025791 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4025791

hundchenkatze 14y ago

Here is a youtube video showing that some of the puzzles can be beaten pretty quickly through brute force. http://youtu.be/Ahu3fvW2H0E http://youtu.be/Ahu3fvW2H0E

slantyyz 14y ago

I have mixed feelings about captchas. As someone who works in tech, I realize it's a somewhat effective solution to a very difficult problem, but as a user, I just hate them. Captchas are like the "customs check" you have to pass to leave a Best Buy. Because of a few bad apples, everyone's customer experience suffers a little.

tokenizer 14y ago
I agree. After looking at all of these comments, it's safe to say this isn't ready to be a recaptcha alternative, but I do appreciate the attempt at making it a better process for the average user.

jsdalton 14y ago

Seems like the "accessibility" alternative is the weakest link here --- easily defeated with simple voice recognition technology.

gridspy 14y ago
I am so glad that I don't have to solve audio CAPTCHAs. That was traumatic!

comex 14y ago

Unfortunately I automatically associate this with "punch the monkey" banner ads and the like; if I saw it on a registration page I think I might skip it without thinking.

mhd 14y ago

First one I got was American-style pancakes, where I was supposed to put syrup and butter on it. Now due to partaking in way too much pop culture, I knew what to do. But while pancakes are pretty common, not everyone eats small, thick ones, stacked to incredible heights and thus is able to recognize them. Never mind the syrup, which is basically as international as a PB&J sandwich. That's the problem with iconography in general. Easily outdated or subject to i18n goofs.

daeken 14y ago
This is off-topic, but are PB&J sandwiches really not a common thing outside of the US? I've never heard this before.
- taybenlor 14y ago
  They are not common outside of the US. Whenever I see people eat them in films and TV Shows I think "Ewww". Surprise, not everywhere is the same.
- mhd 14y ago
  Peanut butter is pretty rare outside of the US. I think the Dutch have it as a "native" product and it's been getting more popular as a "typical American" import. Basically the roles of peanut butter and Nutella are reversed in large parts of Europe.

fchollet 14y ago

Some critical limitations: - Limited puzzle possibilities, making it possible to manually code a simple solver for each specific problem - culture-specific puzzles (I got "how to make pancakes") will cause some confusion among non-US users - more time-wasting & confusing (and therefore more annoying) than Captcha - relatively heavy to load

SCdF 14y ago
I wrote out basically the exact same points (including the pancakes) and then thought to check the rest of the thread.. The one you didn't mention is that it's not great people with older browsers or impaired / older people in general.

kwamenum86 14y ago

First of all, technically this is a CAPTCHA still. Second of all, you can eliminate the vast majority (or sometimes all) of your spam using honeypots much simpler CAPTCHAS like "what is four + 2?".

wbillingsley 14y ago

Ineffective at preventing bots and also ineffective at letting humans through reliably: Good luck to those with accessibility needs (elderly, blind, etc) in catching those moving glyphs... No more vegetarians visiting your site (after all if they don't put pepperoni on their pizzas they must be robots...) The bot-writers meanwhile can write code for each puzzle (the puzzles, requiring art assets, are expensive enough to generate that the many spammers can out-muscle the few areyouhuman puzzle-setters)

SeoxyS 14y ago

The solution to captcha annoyance is not more annoyance in the form of a spammy-looking game. You can get to 99% of the use cases using some simple javascript logic and a hidden form element that is invisible to the user and catch the rest using a solid spam-detection algorithm on the server. The solution to spam is not to annoy your users. At least reCAPTCHA helps transcribe books…