Comments for The Cutest Human-Test: KittenAuth

I foresee a stategic partnership with KittenWar.com.

http://www.kittenwar.com

Cool idea, and thinking in the right direction. It's much harder for a computer to recognize an arbitrary image than an image it knows is some form of warped text. I see a couple flaws, however.

This will only work if everyone using this auth system creates their own images, and not all bloggers will want to go to the trouble to produce 40 or so random images. Even if they did, as was said, it wouldn't be hard for bots to brute force this system, especially with only a 3x3 grid. Also, since the images don't change and there are necessarily fewer of them than the warped text images, it would be easy for a human to go in and quickly identify each image for any popular blog, or any images that people are constantly reusing because they're lazy.

Also, you mentioned that this system would reduce server load because random numbers are not as heavily used as the text version and no image needs to be generated. You might save some processing power, but I'd guess uploading all those additional images to people would take more time than the processing time saved.

God kills a kitten every time I...

nevermind.

Great idea... good job.

Great idea, I might start using something similar.

although, I clicked on 3 kittens (baby rabbits) and it didn't work for me. :)

yes I like it... Next take on the bulliten board problem. I hate it when you have to register at a new site, just to post your 2 cents... I have to work.. If I know something and want to help. It sucks. I was reading a forum the other day and could have helped but I was too lazy to register.

I think global registration is the answer... Meaning I would have an account with PHPbb, vBullitin, ect... Then when I visit a site that uses them I am good to go.

Unless you modified this system any reasonable programmer could destroy this auth system in no time flat. It would involve a little training and an image comparison script. I reload the page a few times, save as many kitten images as I felt like, and keep them marked as "kitten images" Using ImageMagick you could write a image comparison script and a bot could reload the page, check for kitten images on the page, and "click" them when it recognizes three. Could take time, but that is what brute force is for.

Since you have so few kittens, and you are forgetting that someone could train it, it could be defeated. the only way to fix this is to introduce random noise to the image.

I am sure that the guys who's bot run around the web to make sure you are not re-using their porn have figured this out pretty well.

You're really on to something here. I can't say how many times I've had to re-enter an alpha-numeric string that I could barely read from an image. Nice work!

could you write my email address in kitties too?

great idea , great thinking , great great great