

With Solve Media you'll never look at a CAPTCHA the same way again - riffer
http://nothingtosay.firstround.com/2010/09/with-solve-media-youll-never-look-at-a-captcha-the-same-way-again.html

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jbail
Cool idea, but how does it work against spambots? That's the whole point of
CAPTCHA. It's not supposed to be a place to add marketing copy. It's supposed
to ensure actual humans are using your service. This seems like it's going to
be incredibly simple to hack given that the letters are crisp and easily read.
I do see that the example CAPTCHA "ads" differ from company to company, but
there are still basically 3-4 plain text words in the graphic. If I were
making a spambot, I would need to try submitting it 3-4 times until I find the
word that works. Too easy...

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ihumanable
I'm thinking the same thing. Especially since it uses this quoted text thing,
just write your spambot to look for those anchors and extract and OCR the
inner text, done.

It's a clever idea and maybe in the short article they couldn't fully explain
how this works to defeat spam bots. I'd like to know more about it from a tech
and sec perspective.

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revdinosaur
In theory they could prompt advertisers to create distorted ads, simply
requiring users to visually decode the brand name.

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pietrofmaggi
Yes, but how many ads can you have? or you automatically generates a ton of
variation of the same ads otherwise a spammer can just keep a dictionary with
the ads images and the correct answer.

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IgorPartola
Better yet, build up a list of quotes organized by the brand. How many
taglines can Toyota have? So even if the quoted text is obfuscated differently
each time (new font, new noise), you can teach your bot to recognize the
company logo and try one of the few taglines they have.

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photon_off
If I ever encountered a site that used this, I would probably just leave
rather than subject myself to this gimmick. I have no desire to feel like a
rat getting its reward of "continuing" in exchange for memorizing the highest
bidder's slogan. I'm doing the website a favor by signing up, and if that's
the way they are going to start our relationship, it's a signal that I
shouldn't want to sign up to begin with.

That's just me, though, the same person that only fills in 1 of the 2 words in
a captcha correctly. I tend not to respond well to authority.

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danielsoneg
Oh goody, combining my two favorite things in the world: Captchas and
Advertising!

It's good for the user: They get all the respect of a common parrot!

It's good for the site: They piss off their users!

It's good for the advertisers: They get to associate their brand with the
single most irritating part of the modern web next to advertisements!

It's Win/Win/Win!

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ciupicri
This is not a new idea. <http://adcaptcher.com/> is at least one year old and
it's already being used on a couple of sites.

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Osmose
I thought the idea was really cool and appreciated not having to decipher
warped text to fill out a CAPTCHA until I saw this example:
<http://www.solvemedia.com/images/uni.jpg>

Your site would have to provide a LOT of value to make me want to watch a
video to sign up for it (or, heaven forbid, to just comment anonymously).

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thezilch
The author (title) is right; if Solve Media took over the CAPTCHA market, I
would never look at CAPTCHA's again and likely not register with their
customer's. I browse without ad-block extensions, but that in turn means I
subconsciously ignore ad-like, site elements, which would include Solve
Media's CAPTCHA.

I'm curious of Solve Media's affect on their customer's conversion rates.

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Groxx
Hah, brilliant from a business standpoint. It's an ad platform running a
captcha service as a front.

I've got to wonder how well it will work, though: at worst, a bot could just
OCR and respond with random phrases from the ad, and get what? A 10% success
rate? That's _astronomical_ compared to captchas. And to be less annoying,
they'll have to be more readable and simpler and essentially hand-made: all of
which contributes to easier bot attacks. So we have: hand-made + bot-
vulnerable = more-expensive + not-a-solution.

Not that captchas are foolproof. There's quite a large business in human-
botnets to break captchas.

That video is quite good, though. I love their captcha example.

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jrnkntl
I just -love- that video pitch <http://vimeo.com/15041038> by Epipheo Studios
<http://www.epipheostudios.com/>

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sandeepshetty
Publishers, I'm guessing, want to avoid SPAM without inconveniencing their
customers. This idea seems to be pitching the latter (making it easy for the
customer) but says nothing about the former (SPAM!). Apart from the other
issue of showing someone else's brand as part of a sites conversion process, I
think the fact that it does not talk about the spam issue might be a concern
for publisher.

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AndrewWarner
Does anyone know if whether having a 3rd party logo in the middle of a form
decreases or increases completion?

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sandeepshetty
That's an interesting question. I wonder how they decide which ads to show on
a given site (imagine seeing a competitors ad on your sites CAPTCHA!)

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macco
Wasn't there a startup doing this with videos? Video + simple question

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freerobby
Very clever.

