

Areyouhuman: A Great Capcha Alternative - jsherry
http://areyouahuman.com/demo

======
eddie_the_head
One of the main points of reCAPTCHA is to help digitize books, newspapers and
old time radio shows. Everytime you use reCAPTCHA, you're helping in this
effort. I agree this is a nice alternative if it works for people not using
reCAPTCHA but it'd be nice if more people would also use reCAPTCHA on their
sites. Yes, it's free.

<http://www.google.com/recaptcha/learnmore>

<http://www.google.com/recaptcha/whyrecaptcha>

~~~
esalazar
I agree that reCAPTCHA's mission is a noble one. That being said, it is REALLY
annoying sometimes. I think even solutions that contribute to a noble cause
will fall to easier and more intuitive ones (if they exist of course). Not
that I necessarily think this is the answer, but a step in the right
direction.

~~~
twelvechairs
I'm not sure I can agree its 'noble'. Are the resulting digitisations going to
be free to access for everyone? Is the OCR algorithm that I am helping to
create? No.

While it may use your time to 'do something useful' - which is nice, that
something is also to Google's competitive advantage - so its really more good
business sense than noble (to me at least)....

~~~
eddie_the_head
Yes, the resulting digitizations are free to everyone, they are old newspapers
like old NYT issues and books whose copyright has expired and are now in the
public domain. How do you think you are able to search for so many old books
pre-digital age on Google Books and read digital versions of old NYT news
articles?

~~~
twelvechairs
If this is true, why don't they say it on their website? why is there no link
to the material created?

The only digitised versions of the NYT articles I can find on the web are on
the NYT website, and you have to pay for them (at least, if you want the first
paragraph)...

Can you provide me with some proof of what you say (links to free versions of
the NYT for example)? Because I'm afraid I'm having a hard time believing it.

------
loopdoend
This won't work. The puzzle possibilities are limited.

This is about as effective as asking a random question, it stops bots because
they don't know how to deal with it. It wouldn't have a chance against a
targeted spam campaign/attack.

It's cute though.

~~~
tokenizer
Could you please go into more detail?

I'm curious because if you're saying a bot would be stopped at this solution,
but not a human, then wouldn't that also apply to recaptcha as well?

Or are you saying one could automate a solution around this over that being
impossible with recaptcha?

Would like to hear you thoughts.

~~~
loopdoend
A bot would only be stopped by this because of novelty. Recaptcha can easily
be bypassed by using human solvers, which are available for $1.50/1000
captchas last time I checked.

In my opinion, it would be easier to automate this than recaptcha because this
uses common elements that don't have nearly enough difference between them to
make it a challenge. A solve rate of <5% is effective for spammers. How is
this going to stop anything when a spammer can simply cycle through to a game
they know how to beat, and fake the mouse movements and timing?

Recaptcha is difficult to beat with OCR because it is designed to withstand
attacks by OCR considered 'state of the art'. It is impossible to beat with
off the shelf solutions. On the other hand, this would be rather simple to
automate using pixel matching. The shapes and colors don't change (Take the
pancake example, for instance).

~~~
tokenizer
Thanks. I'm definitely rethinking implementing this in anything important.

------
metabren
This may not be such a great alternative — it allows far too many attempts
which make it susceptible to cracking. (a video showing this being beaten by a
bot [1] was posted on HN [2] last week)

[1] [http://spamtech.co.uk/software/cracking-the-areyouhuman-
capt...](http://spamtech.co.uk/software/cracking-the-areyouhuman-captcha/)

[2] <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4025791>

------
comex
Unfortunately I automatically associate this with "punch the monkey" banner
ads and the like; if I saw it on a registration page I think I might skip it
without thinking.

------
hundchenkatze
Here is a youtube video showing that some of the puzzles can be beaten pretty
quickly through brute force. <http://youtu.be/Ahu3fvW2H0E>

------
mhd
First one I got was American-style pancakes, where I was supposed to put syrup
and butter on it. Now due to partaking in way too much pop culture, I knew
what to do. But while pancakes are pretty common, not everyone eats small,
thick ones, stacked to incredible heights and thus is able to recognize them.
Never mind the syrup, which is basically as international as a PB&J sandwich.

That's the problem with iconography in general. Easily outdated or subject to
i18n goofs.

~~~
daeken
This is off-topic, but are PB&J sandwiches really not a common thing outside
of the US? I've never heard this before.

~~~
taybenlor
They are not common outside of the US. Whenever I see people eat them in films
and TV Shows I think "Ewww". Surprise, not everywhere is the same.

------
fchollet
Some critical limitations:

\- Limited puzzle possibilities, making it possible to manually code a simple
solver for each specific problem

\- culture-specific puzzles (I got "how to make pancakes") will cause some
confusion among non-US users

\- more time-wasting & confusing (and therefore more annoying) than Captcha

\- relatively heavy to load

~~~
SCdF
I wrote out basically the exact same points (including the pancakes) and then
thought to check the rest of the thread..

The one you didn't mention is that it's not great people with older browsers
or impaired / older people in general.

------
kwamenum86
First of all, technically this is a CAPTCHA still.

Second of all, you can eliminate the vast majority (or sometimes all) of your
spam using honeypots much simpler CAPTCHAS like "what is four + 2?".

------
wbillingsley
Ineffective at preventing bots and also ineffective at letting humans through
reliably:

Good luck to those with accessibility needs (elderly, blind, etc) in catching
those moving glyphs... No more vegetarians visiting your site (after all if
they don't put pepperoni on their pizzas they must be robots...)

The bot-writers meanwhile can write code for each puzzle (the puzzles,
requiring art assets, are expensive enough to generate that the many spammers
can out-muscle the few areyouhuman puzzle-setters)

------
SeoxyS
The solution to captcha annoyance is not more annoyance in the form of a
spammy-looking game. You can get to 99% of the use cases using some simple
javascript logic and a hidden form element that is invisible to the user and
catch the rest using a solid spam-detection algorithm on the server. The
solution to spam is not to annoy your users. At least reCAPTCHA helps
transcribe books…

------
slantyyz
I have mixed feelings about captchas.

As someone who works in tech, I realize it's a somewhat effective solution to
a very difficult problem, but as a user, I just hate them.

Captchas are like the "customs check" you have to pass to leave a Best Buy.
Because of a few bad apples, everyone's customer experience suffers a little.

~~~
tokenizer
I agree. After looking at all of these comments, it's safe to say this isn't
ready to be a recaptcha alternative, but I do appreciate the attempt at making
it a better process for the average user.

------
rdoherty
Interesting idea of challenging people/bots to complete higher-level tasks to
prove they are human. This just needs keyboard accessibility (I couldn't tab
to the start button or handicap symbol link).

------
jsdalton
Seems like the "accessibility" alternative is the weakest link here --- easily
defeated with simple voice recognition technology.

~~~
gridspy
I am so glad that I don't have to solve audio CAPTCHAs. That was traumatic!

------
Flenser
It costs less than $0.01 to pay a real human to solve a capcha. Capcha's don't
solve the underlying problem.

