What Wiseguys’s wise guys did was to deceitfully purchase large quantities of the priciest tickets to the biggest events in American sports, music and show business and sold them to ticket brokers, who then sold the tickets to the wide public in higher prices, while the Wiseguys had earned $25 millions mark-up. To get over the captcha barrier put by large online ticket websites (which, naturally, want to maintain their good reputation and have no interest in wholesaling their tickets to brokers), the defendants has used captcha bots that were capable coping with both visual and audio captcha, as well as opened and managed hundreds of fictional domains and email addresses for this purpose.

Fighting Captcha Bots

The lesson learned here, that there are bots that can read and hear captcha, successfully and faster than the average human being, is not new. As captcha developers and online security experts are constantly working on strengthening and improving the captcha and adding extra security features, bots and spammers are growing more and sophisticated.

What can you do then, except follow the bots, learn their behavioral patterns and adjust the captcha and anti-spamming solutions correspondingly? For example, if research shows that bots can easily get rid of all the background noises, but have hard time interpreting scribbled texts, then prefer this captha:

over this:

Who is Luis von Ahn?

Luis von Ahn was then an assistant professor of Computer Science at the Carnegie Mellon University (now a professor), a recipient of a Microsoft Research Fellowship and the MacArthur Fellowship (also known as the Genius Award). As aforesaid, he is best known for developing Captcha and reCaptcha.

He begins his human computation lecture by verifying that the audience is well acquaint with the captcha procedure required at the end of an online registration form. Then he brings up the captcha paradox: captcha is a program designed to pass tests designed to automatically fail programs. Thus, if programs like captcha lean on human knowledge and experience, what more can computers learn from humans? Or in other words, how can us humans humanize computers further?

Humanizing Computers

One thing that humans do better then computers is give the most accurate description of an image. Google image search, for example, is based on text, the names given to the image files rather than the image content itself. What flaws the accuracy and reliability of the search results, and moreover, reduces the accessibility of the web to the visually impaired.

To challenge captcha tests, spam experts have created “captcha sweat shops”, usually in developing countries, where employees solve captcha puzzles all day for about $2.5 an hour, i.e. about 1/3 cent per puzzle. Similarly, humans can be exploited to improve internet search results. But instead of paying people to tag web images all day, Mr. von Ahn has found a better, faster, and even cheaper way to fasten images labeling online.

If only in 2003, 9 billions of humans hours have been used for the purpose of playing solitaire, he thought, the wasted human cycles can be used similarly. That way, he came up with the ESP Game. The ESP Game is an online, two-players’ game where players are paired randomly and have no ability to communicate with each other. Both players are presented with an image they are required to describe in one word. To score points, they are also required to provide the same one word description as their play partners.

Of course, cheaters are always a concern, so the players had to first undergo test images, and only if passed successfully their results were taken in consideration. Still, tagging images is an inexact, often controversial science, and to make things more accurate, players faced challenges like being introduced to “taboo words” (words that cannot be included in the description), were informed about the other player’s playing time to encourage competitiveness and offered a single player version of the game.

Later on, the enthusiastic response the ESP Game led to more sophisticated games. Such as Peekaboom, which was designed to train computer vision research so they will be able to identify each part of a complicated image, and Verbosity (then not yet released), a two-players guessing game based on familiar party games and aimed to collect common sense facts, an ability computers lack and humans usually own.

The re-captcha system was developed by one of the original captcha developers, Luis von Ahn of Carnegie Mellon University who had estimated the time spent by humans on captchas as 500,000 hours a day, and, as Carsten Cumbrowski suggests, decided to reprocess the time wasted for solving captcha tests usefully for a change. Or in his own, no less self criticizing words: “Life is only like 700,000 hours, so it’s almost the equivalent of a life. We thought, is there any way we can use this human effort in a way that’s good for humanity?”

Facebook, Twitter and many other websites have joined the mutual effort by implementing reCaptcha. In 2009, reCaptcha was obtained by Google, for its books and news search archive digitization ventures. ReCaptha’s most successful task by now is the digitization of the New York Times 130 years old archive, which started at the end of 2008 and expected to be done by the end of this year. Then what? “There’s no danger of us running out of words,” said von Ahn to BBC News at the end of 2007.
“There are still about 100 million books to be digitized”.
And probably no less spamming bots.

Although the standard captcha is usually accompanied with a disabled icon, offering the blind or visually impaired an audible version of the text, it hardly facilitates. Maybe because the audio captcha is usually as vague and ambiguous as the text captcha, and perhaps due to the unsuitable environmental conditions for careful listening an audio captcha requires.

Fortunately, there are some captcha alternatives that help the visually impaired regain his belonging to the human society:

-          Image captcha – where the user is asked to recognize a certain image in a group of images.
-          Question captcha – with first grade math quizzes or simple logic questions
-          Verification code – where an activation code is sent to your email address or cellular phone and you should verify it back.

Other captcha alternative may include a bigger and bolder text or alpha numeric combination on a contrasting background.

Thus, Confident Technologies has released its image based captcha plugin for Wordpress, stating that product is “easy on people while being tough on bots” as opposed to the frustrating, site abandoning encourager text based captcha. Confident Captcha displays a number of images, organized in a grid, asking the user to prove his humanness by clicking on one of the presented images. Users can choose the number of images and the background color to avoid the common side effect of image based captcha, its being the center of attention.

Just released on June 23, the Confidential Captcha was downloaded only by two dozens of users (as for the moment of writing); Still, looking at some of the most popular text-based captcha plugins for Wordpress, you hardly notice a meaningful drop in the number of downloads a day, nor a huge increase in the number of image-based captcha downloads. So,difficult or not, most Wordpress users may be still hung on the good old “type the two words” captcha.

The group took more than 300,000 captchas, all are examples taken from popular web companies such as Yahoo! and Google, and gave them to humans (native English speakers) to solve.
When the same captcha was given to three different human subjects, only 71% of the time they had agreed on the right answer.

If to be more specific, Study participants succeeded in solving Google’s and Yahoo!’s CAPTCHAs only 87% of the time, while the ones used by Microsoft were solved correctly only 80% of the time. In audio captcha testing (made for the blind) the results were even worth, as recognition was found to be “as low as 39% for Microsoft and 35% in Google’s case”.

These results support the saying that Captchas – originally designed to keep bots out of all kinds of online platforms and thus prevent spam – are sometime too hard not only for robots but also for humans to decipher.

Ran into some funny or amusing captcha you feel like sharing with the world?
write it down at the comments section and we’ll add it to our list

During the years it has become almost an integral part of our digital lives (most of us get really pissed off when we have to copy those weary letters before login a web).
Nevertheless, the bright side of Captcha is revealed, strange enough, in art.

The name is Aram Barholl.
Aram Barholl is an artist that deals with the intersection between real life and digital world and now he decided to use the Captcha concept as part of streets graffiti.

His art can be seen on the following video

Sweet, right?
Or as Gizmodo says it:
“I like to imagine him announcing that you may not continue walking down a sidewalk before reading an alphanumeric sequence out loud”.
LOL 

]]> http://adscaptcha.com/2010/05/26/captcha-mixing-security-with-art/feed/ 0 http://adscaptcha.com/2010/05/24/brand-advertising-%e2%80%93-its-all-about-trust/ http://adscaptcha.com/2010/05/24/brand-advertising-%e2%80%93-its-all-about-trust/#comments Mon, 24 May 2010 11:05:49 +0000 Ads Captcha http://adscaptcha.com/?p=207 What is brand advertising?

Brand is a promise, an idea according to which no benefit could be gained by consumer from other products except for the brand he loves. A consumer falls in love with a certain brand, he trusts it and develops a long term loyalty.

Brand advertising is nothing but building trust! It is not the logo of your firm, it is not a slogan or special design of your product but a collection of associations the consumer feels for your brand. In other words, brand advertising builds an emotional connection between the brand and the consumers which later leads to loyalty.

How do you build brand loyalty?
After all, no matter how good your company is, there’s a competition in almost any field. So how could you make your brand to float above this competition, to make your brand the most visible one?

In one sentence – in order to gain brand prominence, you must differentiate your brand from others and this can be done quite easily through advertising .Advertising delivers your message to a wide range of potential customers the fastest way you ever know.

Successful advertisement means repetition and frequency, otherwise, you are quickly forgotten. Therefore, advertising is an investment in growth of your firm, growth of potential customers, growth of familiarity of your firm – until it turns into a brand!…

What are your brand advertising options?
A comprehensive branding campaign must be based upon a combination of several media channels such as print, television, adverts on subways and buses, radio, as well as online brand advertising such as banners, textual ads, blogs and videos – anything that has a great impact on consumers.

Last but not least is something quite new.
What I talk about is some sort of hidden brand advertising. The name is “Captcha advertising” and it is definitely the next big thing in the area of brand advertising…

In the next couple of weeks, Staker and Goldback will release a new Captcha called ConfidentCaptcha which is an image based captcha .

The ConfidentCaptcha was born due to the fact that on each day of the week, 200 million Captchas are presented all over the online sphere and yet it seems like they don’t do their job properly – not only that bots find ways to bypass the captcha test, 20% of websites are abandoned simply because “people can’t read those squiggly characters”!!!

The ConfidentCaptcha should make it easier for internet users to decipher the captcha image while preventing bots to do so and by that to increase the online security of all kinds of websites.  The ConfidentCaptcha presents an image grid not of letters and numbers but of objects such as  refrigerators, houses or people.
So simple and yet brilliant. Don’t you think?

]]> http://adscaptcha.com/2010/05/14/confident-captcha-next-captcha/feed/ 0