Wednesday, March 7. 2007
Microsoft Asirra Project
Microsoft Research has come out with a really neat way to prevent spam bots while at the same time helping find home for pets that need one.
Other companies have done similar captchas with pictures for people to evaluate. What makes this one particularly interesting is that they're providing an adoption service for these animals at the same time that they're performing a valuable service for the sites they're protecting. Click here for a sample.
Web services are often protected with a challenge that's supposed to be easy for people to solve, but difficult for computers. Such a challenge is often called a CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart) or HIP (Human Interactive Proof). HIPs are used for many purposes, such as to reduce email and blog spam and prevent brute-force attacks on web site passwords.
HIP Example Today, the most common HIPs ask users to identify text that has been distorted or obscured. Unfortunately, such challenges can be difficult and frustrating for people, yet are often easily solved by computers.
Asirra (Animal Species Image Recognition for Restricting Access) is a HIP that works by asking users to identify photographs of cats and dogs. This task difficult for computers, but our user studies have shown that people can accomplish it quickly and accurately. Many even think it's fun!
HIP Example Today, the most common HIPs ask users to identify text that has been distorted or obscured. Unfortunately, such challenges can be difficult and frustrating for people, yet are often easily solved by computers.
Asirra (Animal Species Image Recognition for Restricting Access) is a HIP that works by asking users to identify photographs of cats and dogs. This task difficult for computers, but our user studies have shown that people can accomplish it quickly and accurately. Many even think it's fun!
Other companies have done similar captchas with pictures for people to evaluate. What makes this one particularly interesting is that they're providing an adoption service for these animals at the same time that they're performing a valuable service for the sites they're protecting. Click here for a sample.
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I recently saw a very interesting Google TechTalks video presented by Luis von Ahn of Carnegie Mellon University. He shows how CAPTCHAs and similar methods (like Asirra) are fine for small traffic sites, but are not effective for very large web sites (gmail, hotmail, yahoo services, etc...).
At about 4:30 minutes into the video, he talks about sweat shops that have been set up just to solve CAPTCHAs all day long for about 1/3 of a cent per solution. The CAPTCHAs are solved via a service much like Amazon's Mechanical Turk. This could also be applied to solving Asirra.
For my sites, I like to use a the "Negative CAPTCHA" method to prevent spam accounts. Hidden form fields are used to trick bots into filling them out. It's effective and doesn't require any extra effort from your legitimate users. ( http://damienkatz.net/2007/01/negative_captch.html )
I recommend checking out the whole video. He's put together some very innovative ways of making good use of the 9 billion wasted "human computation" hours per year playing solitare. By comparison, the Empire State Building was built using only 7 million human hours.
Video link: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8246463980976635143
At about 4:30 minutes into the video, he talks about sweat shops that have been set up just to solve CAPTCHAs all day long for about 1/3 of a cent per solution. The CAPTCHAs are solved via a service much like Amazon's Mechanical Turk. This could also be applied to solving Asirra.
For my sites, I like to use a the "Negative CAPTCHA" method to prevent spam accounts. Hidden form fields are used to trick bots into filling them out. It's effective and doesn't require any extra effort from your legitimate users. ( http://damienkatz.net/2007/01/negative_captch.html )
I recommend checking out the whole video. He's put together some very innovative ways of making good use of the 9 billion wasted "human computation" hours per year playing solitare. By comparison, the Empire State Building was built using only 7 million human hours.
Video link: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8246463980976635143
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