PlayThru Captcha
After the lecture we had about moving-object CAPTCHAs I searched about new CAPTCHAs in the hope of observing a new brand of CAPTCHA’s. And I found one!. PlayThru system which has been developed by Are You a Human can be a substitute for cryptic CAPTCHAs. They said “Hieroglyphics were fine for Pharaohs, but your users deserve better”. They, instead of giving an obscure CAPTCHA to solve, give you a simple game to play and if you simply do that you would be recognized as a human. Isn’t this exciting?
In fact the problem is, as the automated systems got better and better at solving CAPTCHAs, the CAPTCHAs had to get tougher, enough so that humans couldn’t always get them right. I encourage you to look at this info graphic which describes the agony that traditional CAPTCHAs provide for users. They believe one in four people fail to decipher current CAPTCHAs on their first attempt. For me, it happened many times I could not solve a CAPTCHA.
Also they state firmly that with PlayThru they defeat CAPTCHA farming; given distorted CAPTCHA, scammers hire humans, usually in developing countries and pay them to solve every CAPTCHA their automated systems encounter or they put it in porn sites which would make enough incentive for people to solve them. Since each CAPTCHA always has the same solution no matter who solves it, or where CAPTCHAs could be solved easily; however with Playthru the human user must actively maneuver the floating icons and There’s no “answer” that could be supplied by someone else. To me it does not seem convincible; scammers can write some codes that take the control of the mouse and deploy the solution for the PlayThru. Obviously it would be a harder tasks but it turns out that it is doable. All they need is some knowledge of moving object recognition.
If you’d like to see the system in action, there’s a working PlayThru demo on the Are You a Human home page. Maybe someday we get rid of those tedious CAPTCHAs.
Tags: CAPTCHA
Hi,
I think your prediction of that this captcha is not safe is true. while walking over several of the youtube videos and i found that this system is already broken and you could watch it on. The person who has broken the code/game explains that it was pretty easy and it just require knowledge of python and SimpleCV. Though his bot was flagged first time but now its being improved and passes itself as an human.
References:
1)https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=Ahu3fvW2H0E#!
2)http://spamtech.co.uk/software/bots/cracking-the-areyouhuman-captcha/
3)http://hackaday.com/2012/05/25/captcha-bot-beats-new-are-you-a-human-playthru-game/
Cool.
I checked the video and read the comments. As he mentioned in this updated video which has been posted on May2012 passing the tests doesnt mean Playthru has not recognized you as a robot. Thus, he updated his approach.
however as he opened the games about 30 minutes earlier and they’d already timed out the method didnt worked fitst. When loading fresh games, the bot passed without issue.