Comments for The Cutest Human-Test: KittenAuth

If reading that was a bit heavy heres a summary...

"This puts the number of the image clicked into a hidden field (checking its not already been clicked) and when the value reaches a length of 3, it submits the page via a synchronous form post (functioning like a submit button).

As an added note, to stop browsers caching the images to a particular filename (causing people to think non-kitten spots were kittens and v-v) the system generates a random double and attaches that to the end of the image name when the form loads but its completely ignored by the image outputting system.

Typically the community that are most going to want to use this are bloggers that want to secure their blog comment system without making people sign up or sending out emails to their given address and having to come back and auth each message.

Personally, I have the joy of having my own system and not having to work around someone else's code so all of this is as easy to implement as writing the code and dropping it in place instead of the submit button but other people will need help getting a system for their blogging software."

Even if people are blind, how are they going to read the random captcha text generated? the entire point of it is to make it so that computers can not read the text that is generated but humans can, so the readers that blind people often use to navigate the web will not be able to understand the random text. I honestly don't think that this system is any more inaccesible than what is in use today.

As was previously stated, you can easily catalog all of the kitten pictures (unless you have a limitless supply of unique images). That being said, if you decide to use different random seeds, you now have a localization issue. For instance, if you instructed your visitors to click 3 pictures of a frog, the people who speak/read Japanese wont know what you're asking them to do, since the word for frog is different in most languages. While this is probably fine for Joe-bob's blog, it wont work for people who want to attract a global audience or who care about making money.

This is just crazy enough it works! As another commenter said, it can also be expanded for even more effect. Awesome.

--- I tried to send this yesterday, but it wouldn't accept it -> each load showed teh kittens as the top three pics - caching issue? --

Someone above mentioned there's a problem, but they said it was that you could still be brute forced because the number of combinations are 84. But it's really quite a lot worse than that. If your site is really worth the trouble of writing a bot to analyze scrambled letters spekled, swirled, and gaussian blurred alphanumarics, then it's certainly worth writing a "kittytest" routine.

You see, it's easier to check for kittenness than you think - and I'll admit that this person has to be after you and really wanting to leave you a bunch of love letters. Anyway here's a couple ways around it:

precompile a list of all possible pictures and then:
1) compare hash values of the pics against your list
2) compare specific "unique" pixels to each picture.

A friend just said "well, have a lot of pictures, show different ones different days". My response - "yes, and change the brightness levels, and move them around - never serve the same hash twice"

Do too much, of course, and the kitten gets all grainy, and the swirls on his head will make him look like an owl - and then we're back to where we started.

I like it - maybe someone will arm us with a great set of php scripts that takes care of those things. It's way better than swirly text, I agree.

(on several reloads your kittens were 1,2,3 at the top)

I recommend taking this pitch directly to http://www.catsinsinks.com and http://www.stuffonmycat.com

God, quit worrying about blind people. How many of them are there, anyway. I hardly ever see one.

Unless you can generate new kittens and take pictures of them on-the-fly, a spammer could still collect all the pictures of kittens you use and compare them to each of the nine pictures displayed. Unless you have lots of kittens.

This is a good idea. The images could be themed to the Web site. If it was a racing site you would click on pictures of cars. If the site was tech in nature you would click on computers...