5 interesting alternatives to text captchas

Captchas, the bot-blocking verification devices that make you copy  a set of fuzzy letters for security before registering on a site, are getting more and more annoying. Thanks to the increasing intelligence of  character recognition technology, we're being expected to strain our eyes to make out whether something is a Q or an O, a J or an I, upper or lower case, and so forth. What, for example, is this?  Words? I don't think so.

There's been a lot of talk in the past few months of alternative ideas involving object recognition... the idea being that humans do this much better than computers.  Here are five promising approaches.

(...but as described this idea vulnerable to straight guesses.  Spammers will take 1 in 9 attempts as success.)

(...addresses problem in the above, but - as executed here - some rotations hard to match even for humans.)

(Need to see wider variety of pics to judge.)

(Strikes me as both fun and exceptionally hard for a spam-bot to break... except by guessing right 1 time in 40,000.)

(This predates the others and to a layman seems ingenious. Michael tells me his patent application for his method is not yet through, and he has another even better idea about to be unveiled.)

Some more links:
- Captchas in wkiipedia 
- a Technobabble article claiming that all captchas are doomed to be broken... 
- and a typically funny and fascinating discussion on Slashdot about the Technobabble artice here. 

P.S That often infuriating ReCapatcha technology illustrated at the top at least has a silver lining. You are 
helping to digitize books
 that scanning computers can't read.

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7 responses
Well, the best part about reCAPTCHA (because the one in your example is actually the Carnegie Mellon project based on CAPTCHA technology) is that it digitizes books by harnessing crowdsourcing – all that fuzzy text actually comes from real scans of books and the algorithm picks out the most common wisdom-of-the-crowds interpretation of that text as people type out the words, thus digitizing the original book. (More about the project here: http://is.gd/grNf) Which is fascinating and hugely useful from a cultural standpoint.

So while these other technologies are certainly neat from a technical perspective, I think the pure cultural utility of the reCAPTCHA initiative deems it far superior.

— brainpicker
interesting alternatives, but unlike audio-capable reCAPTCHs, won't it be difficult for the visual-impaired to sign up for services using these?
— ar
...aaand I'm an idiot for not reading the P.S., sorry. I find it hugely annoying when other people do that, now here I am both annoying AND hypocritical. Ugh...
— brainpicker
Captcha is dead as protection, no matter is it audio, 3d model etc. It's just too easy & cheap to outsource it to India and similar countries. Did you know you can get 1000 captchas typed for less than $1?

In my opinion there should be a fundamental change of how search engines work so this kind of link spam becomes obsolete.

— Marko Polojärvi
So if 10000 monkeys reCAPTCHA'd 10000 pages a day for 10000 years, they will eventually reconstruct the book from which the text was scanned.
— David Wood
http://4load.info/
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— 4load
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