

Fend Off Trolls, Bots and Jerks With ‘Empathy’ Test - 001sky
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/10/empathy-captcha/

======
sethrin
Your post advocates a

(x) technical ( ) legislative ( ) market-based ( ) vigilante

approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work.
(One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may
have other flaws which vary from state to state.)

( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses ( ) Mailing lists
and other legitimate email uses would be affected ( ) No one will be able to
find the guy or collect the money ( ) It is defenseless against brute force
attacks (x) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it (
) Users of email will not put up with it ( ) Microsoft will not put up with it
( ) The police will not put up with it ( ) Requires too much cooperation from
spammers (x) Requires cooperation from too many of your friends and is
counterintuitive ( ) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at
once ( ) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential
employers ( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists ( )
Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business ( ) Ideas
similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever worked ( )
Other:

Specifically, your plan fails to account for

( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it ( ) Lack of centrally controlling authority
for email ( ) Open relays in foreign countries ( ) Ease of searching tiny
alphanumeric address space of all email addresses (x) Asshats ( )
Jurisdictional problems ( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes ( ) Public
reluctance to accept weird new forms of money ( ) Huge existing software
investment in SMTP ( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack (
) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email ( ) Armies of
worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes ( ) Eternal arms race involved
in all filtering approaches ( ) Extreme profitability of spam ( ) Joe jobs
and/or identity theft ( ) Technically illiterate politicians ( ) Extreme
stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers (x) Dishonesty
on the part of spammers themselves ( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by
client filtering ( ) Outlook ( ) Other:

and the following philosophical objections may also apply:

( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable ( ) SMTP headers should not be
the subject of legislation ( ) Blacklists suck ( ) Whitelists suck ( ) We
should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored ( ) Countermeasures
cannot involve wire fraud or credit card fraud ( ) Countermeasures cannot
involve sabotage of public networks ( ) Sending email should be free ( ) Why
should we have to trust you and your servers? ( ) Incompatiblity with open
source or open source licenses (x) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the
problem ( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome ( ) I don't want
the government reading my email ( ) Killing them that way is not slow and
painful enough ( ) Other:

Furthermore, this is what I think about you:

(x) Nice try, dude, but I don't think it will work. ( ) This is a stupid idea,
and you're a stupid person for suggesting it. ( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going
to find out where you live and burn your house down!

~~~
jrockway
I like these, but it doesn't really work this time.

The problem is that their idea won't work. "emotions" is too small a search
space. A spam bot could just answer "terrible" to every question and still
send a good amount of spam.

reCaptcha works because there are a lot of words in English and a lot of
source material that needs to be digitized. That makes it infesible to guess
one word, let alone two words at the same time.

This emot-i-captcha requires a human to come up with an unbounded number of
unique questions and answers, which is impossible.

~~~
dlss
I think the bigger problem is that the questions are currently in plain text,
which, since they require a human to write and once solved are solved forever,
makes the approach as implemented a sort of quixotic reverse captcha.

If they switch to image based questions, the potential problems for human
solvers are magnified.

------
lmkg
My first reaction to this is "that's dumb." But then, I remember a few studies
I've heard of. Basically, if people are made to write an essay in favor of a
position (like for or against abortion), even if it's one they initially
disagree with, their opinions will be measurably more sympathetic to that
position afterwards. So maybe this isn't entirely dumb after all.

Obviously, there's a big gap between writing an essay and typing a single
word. Supposedly, the trigger was having to consider the reasoning behind a
position, which you don't have to do to type just one word. But who knows,
maybe the cumulative effect could actually do something.

Note also that this isn't a real captcha, in the traditional sense. It doesn't
work by keeping the trolls out. It works by making them slightly less troll-
ish, through repeated exposure. While outwardly similar, it's a very different
model, and you would not expect any immediate effect.

~~~
xyzzy123
Right, the term for this is psychological priming.

e.g:
[http://livinglifewithoutanet.wordpress.com/2010/08/17/honest...](http://livinglifewithoutanet.wordpress.com/2010/08/17/honesty-
and-priming/)

I think it's interesting that you could A/B test this; prime only some users
and see if it reduces trolling in that group.

------
coderdude
Trolling is the art of feigning one or more of the following: empathy,
ignorance, sincerity. You're really only fending off non-native speakers and
spammers who give up very quickly (one could guess and ultimately get many
correct answers). Not to mention that there will be a finite and probably
short list of question/answer combos. Most of the variation will be in the
questions I imagine and it will be in the form of noise (synonyms and
different sentence structures).

They make it very easy to scrape too. The question text is plain text (no need
to OCR that) and you can run that through your favorite NLP package to extract
useful structure to work from. The answers are each displayed as individual
images on the page, making it trivial to know how many possible answers there
are. That also makes it easier to run your favorite OCR package on the
individually sliced images.

Always glad to see people cracking away at this problem though. It's great
fodder for machine learning enthusiasts.

~~~
001sky
_Trolling is the art of feigning one or more of the following: empathy,
ignorance, sincerity._

\-- They are, in this way, like terrorists. The more you let them in, the
greater the damage.

~~~
001sky
There are all kinds of uses for social engineering.

We should not be surprsised not all of the are pleasant.

Nor should we be surprised, that some are more (or: less) _transparent_ than
others.

------
wamatt
_> "How does that make you feel"_

Mu.

Obviously it's dead simple to guess the _'correct'_ answer.

But wrapping it in a faux test of one's humanness is an off-putting premise,
that can come across morally condescending (which probably wasn't the
intention).

While I support civil rights and the group behind it is probably well
intentioned, it doesn't follow automatically that this instance of execution
is a good idea.

Also, it's probably fallacious to assume only 3 emotions (or any at all for
that matter), are occurring in the user.

 _"meh"_ , _"bored"_ or _"mildly annoyed"_ etc, are perfectly valid answers
too, and does not mean we are jerks for feeling that way :p

~~~
jamestc
I agree. It's a pretty shallow idea. Is it a terrible thing to be "fascinated"
by something that is supposedly terrible? Fascination doesn't actually
necessitate a polarized reaction. And, really, exclusionary
tactics/gatekeeping with opinions? These seem like awfully short-sighted
solutions to a deeper problem.

And, what's more, trolls aren't hard to mobilize if provoked. Start
implementing this and I wouldn't doubt seeing a small movement devoted to
going the extra mile to offend people with "humane" sensibilities.

------
bitwize
Oh look, a Voight-Kampff test for the interbutts.

Fun fact about people with no empathy: they are often profoundly skilled at
feigning empathy when they feel they are being tested for it.

~~~
jawns
Apparently, that's one of the marks of a psychopath:

[http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/otl8z/iama_diagnosed_p...](http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/otl8z/iama_diagnosed_psychopath_im_female_ama/)

~~~
pbhjpbhj
_Post hoc ergo propter hoc_ ?

------
desireco42
This whole idea is repulsive to me, chairman Mao would probably welcome it,
but that is all. It is dumb idea made by people who are not interested in
solving captcha, but pushing their own vision on how morals should be. If in
the age of internets we can't stand people with differing opinions and all
have to be beaten into same mold, then we are really screwed.

------
leddt
In addition to the questionable morals of such a system, I think it is
technically flawed.

Most captchas work because the words they present to users are mostly random
assortments of letters. This one, however, presents real dictionary words. It
is pretty conceivable that a bot, armed with a dictionary file, would have a
pretty high rate of success correctly identifying at least one of the three
words.

If it then randomly chooses one of the identified words, it would have a rate
of success at solving the captcha nearing 33%. This is extremely high when
your bot is trying to solve thousands of captchas per minute.

------
nc17
I can see this idea used to keep out people who don't conform to groupthink.
You could ask questions about abortion, god, taxes, etc.

The problem is that the questions need to be very clever to avoid giving away
the site's bias (and thus the answers).

------
starpilot
Hmm. No involuntary dilation of the irises...

~~~
ktizo
The tortoise lays on its back, its belly baking in the hot sun, beating its
legs trying to turn itself over, but it can't. Not without your help. But
you're not helping...

~~~
tnuc
What's a tortoise?

------
Afal
To be honest I don't think this will stop trolls, or at least not the ones
that actually believe what they say. There will be still some trolls that will
fill in the correct word in the captcha and say stupid shit in the comment.
Asking for someone to think morally for a brief second is not going to stop
people. This is "just another captcha" to most.

I don't think it's effective against bots either. If a bot can read the three
options it has a 1/3 chance of getting it right (assuming that the bot would
choose randomly). In fact from the sample captcha it looks like one of the
words is not like the others and therefore you could possibly eliminate that
making it a 50:50 chance (again assuming it picks it randomly, that there's an
odd one out, and that the odd one out is unrelated to the text above).

Although, I suppose that the idea of the captcha is to show awareness, rather
than actually stop spam or trolling. It's neat, but not a great spamkiller.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
> _or at least not the ones that actually believe what they say_ //

I thought the point of trolling was to say things [that you didn't necessarily
believe] simply to provoke an emotional or forceful response from the reader.

If you believe it you're not trolling; possibly flame-baiting?

------
politician
Is it ethical to use this form of mind control? Who decides how you should be
reprogrammed?

~~~
mooism2
Oh come now. This is hardly less ethical than the methods used by e.g. Fox
News or the Daily Mail, but we seem to be mostly comfortable with that.

------
LolWolf
Obligatory xkcd reference: <http://xkcd.com/233/>

Anyways, point is, although it's a good idea, I don't see it being either
wide-spread or significantly more effective than re-CAPTCHA, et al., nor do I
see it 'aiding' in emotion, so to speak.

But, I would love for someone to prove me wrong on this, because it is an
interesting approach.

------
fchollet
Not a serious attempt at implementing the concept. They only seem to have a
few different questions in total. About 6.

Also even with a serious question DB, it would be extremely easy to crack,
because of the small pool of answer words and the fact that it's always the
negative one you're supposed to pick. With such a low entropy problem, some
basic ML and it would be over.

------
gogetter
How would Steve Jobs have fared on these empathy tests?

What if they asked questions about workers in Chinese factories?

D'oh!

------
KMag
"This enables a simpler and more effective way of keeping sites spam free as
well as taking a stand for human rights."

Over-stating the security implications of their system for the purposes of
getting press for an upcoming event is short-sighted.

------
bengl3rt
What about sociopaths?

