Oct 11, 2008
I am pretty sure everyone has seen CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart) before. Maybe you didn't know the (full) name but you have encountered it when registering accounts, posting comments or accessing some parts of web. You know, those annoying things that are exercising your ability to recognize distorted words with weird backgrounds.
CAPTCHAs are used to protect against automated attacks. For example automatic registration of new users on Gmail would create great opportunities for spammers. CAPTCHAs are mostly working, even when they get "hacked" from time to time. The biggest problem? They are reaching levels where even humans are having problems reading the letters. I still have nightmares when I remember CAPTCHAs used on RapidShare. Telling cats from dogs was not that easy for me somehow. I am not sure about "hackability" of reCAPTCHA, but as far as usability goes, it's one of the best ones for me. Too bad only a few sites are using it.
The main problem of CAPTCHAs is not the complexity but relay attacks and human solvers from 3rd world countries paid for solving thousands of CAPTCHAs a day. What we really need is CAPTHHA (Completely Automated Public Test to tell Humans and Humans Apart). Computer science is far from being able to tell humans with "clean" intentions from those being paid to get past the defences. One solution would be to issue certificates of "humanity" signed by central authority. You could then ban users that were misusing their certificates. There are of course privacy and security problems with this approach, not to mention financial "issues", so I guess this is not how it's gonna work. Other approaches have also been tried, but they usually have problems with disabled people. I am certainly interested how Computer Science solves this problem.
CAPTCHAs are used to protect against automated attacks. For example automatic registration of new users on Gmail would create great opportunities for spammers. CAPTCHAs are mostly working, even when they get "hacked" from time to time. The biggest problem? They are reaching levels where even humans are having problems reading the letters. I still have nightmares when I remember CAPTCHAs used on RapidShare. Telling cats from dogs was not that easy for me somehow. I am not sure about "hackability" of reCAPTCHA, but as far as usability goes, it's one of the best ones for me. Too bad only a few sites are using it.
The main problem of CAPTCHAs is not the complexity but relay attacks and human solvers from 3rd world countries paid for solving thousands of CAPTCHAs a day. What we really need is CAPTHHA (Completely Automated Public Test to tell Humans and Humans Apart). Computer science is far from being able to tell humans with "clean" intentions from those being paid to get past the defences. One solution would be to issue certificates of "humanity" signed by central authority. You could then ban users that were misusing their certificates. There are of course privacy and security problems with this approach, not to mention financial "issues", so I guess this is not how it's gonna work. Other approaches have also been tried, but they usually have problems with disabled people. I am certainly interested how Computer Science solves this problem.
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