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A graduate seminar: current topics in computer security
 

Posts Tagged ‘CAPTCHA’


Thanks to PlayThru the CAPTCHA story has come to an end?

December 2nd, 2012 by on1
PlayThru Captcha

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.