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You don't need to, because i thought we already solved this problem with kittenauth ages ago? I mean with kittenauth any human can tell you "Which kitten has a black patch on the right eye" or "Which kitten has a bobtail" but a spambot isn't gonna be able to figure out squat from that. Of course i suppose you could pay some Chinese a buck an hour to answer but you could do that to CAPTCHA as well, and at least this way we get to see kittens.

I wrote this several years ago when the PS3 was on the verge of being released. They're a company that you just can't trust to do the sane thing let alone the right thing. I bet most of you forget that the original PS3 controller was fifteen-feet wide and curved like a boomerang.

http://thepcspy.com/read/how_sony_screwed_up/

So if the CAPTCHA is doomed, what is the next approach? Letting spam bots go rampant over a site is not an acceptable alternative.

Kitten Auth

I know that KittenAuth is an old idea, but can anyone tell me why isn't this system ideal to replace current captchas?

All you need is a society created element (attractiveness, cuteness, is this a lot/or is this a little?)

Something like KittenAuth has been recommended, and still seems to be the best answer in my opinion.

This can be taken to randomly selected animals, not just cats. If someone develops an AI that can determine what type of an animal each is, then GOOD, we are one step closer to AI. Next would be cuteness/hairy looking/ugly/happy looking/etc. for each random animal. Just keep going a step further.

Any words or phrases with questions can eventually and easily be broken (hell, write your script to google search for the answer to the captchas)

http://www.thepcspy.com/kittenauth

It doesn't even matter, this looks even easier than a regular captcha;

Test 1: I literally clicked in the middle of the "image" (whatever geometric was supposed to mean in context. I didn't know if I had to click the center of an image, or center of the subject in the image). Which was laid out in a nice 3x2 grid, meaning halfway over, and quarter way down = jackpot.

Test 2: The site was slashdotted, so I couldn't see the image, but I could see the options. 15 options. That's a 1/15 chance, so the basis is going off of adding more options to make this harder for a computer. Decent thought, but 1/15 chance of a computer being successful regardless of the image AND knowing your subscribers have to read 15 words to find the answer.

No offense to the guy, but this seemed easier than a captcha requiring an OCR. To be honest, the cute captcha"/kittenAuth was still the best idea(s) I've seen, cause it's based on human opinion opposed to an "absolute" answer.

1) Doesn't it potentially take up a LOT more room on a page than captcha? That might clutter up pages even more than they are already. I guess they could use tiny icon pictures to fix that part.

2) Is there a way that spammers could figure out a way to divert the images to a human's malwared computer and have them do the choosing for the program? I thought I read about this somewhere as one way botnets were getting by captchas as well.

3) Seems something like this would have to catch on in nerd communities first and I loved the kitten idea personally. It's the cutest thing ever, but wouldn't you nerds rather find the Halo guy or Linus Torvalds or something...?

*iza

p.s. (Direct link to test kitten auth, but now I think it is /.ed)

Does this guy know the program he made created one of the worst sappers of computer processor and hard drive performance seen in the anti-virus market? http://www.thepcspy.com/read/what_really_slows_windows_down/5

I didn't see any mention of photo captchas like KittenAuth in the comments here. Considering how much money has been spent on trying to recognize an image of a tank and it is still lousy, it would seem to me that this would be much more secure (and easier for a broad base of people) than text captchas.

All too true. These AV programs need huge overhauls.

Read this

Norton Internet security breaks so many apps it's not even funny.

Last time I installed Norton "Antivirus" I also got Norton Recycle Bin and a load of other stuff I didn't want (and had no option to not install).

Funny sig ! ISPs do very little to protect users. Take for example AOHELL. Just because someone offers a better service doesnt mean they will get more users. ISPs could notify users there boxes are sending spam. Its trivial to tell if someone is sending spam, there are numerous blockers/scanners which could detect the spam being sent, and then the isp could notify the customer. Will they do this...... no, because they don't care / make money from it. False positives may be an issue, but the entire process does not need to be automated. I'm sure they couldn't kill all the spam, they could however behead some botnet zombies, by being more proactive/informing customers. ISPs do very little to curb this stuff, it is obvious that the could do more, considering they are acting as the gateway to the rest of the internet, they don't have to / can prevent proliferation of these actions. Here is a list some ideas: http://www.thepcspy.com/articles/security/shouldnt _isps_protect_their_users

How about something along the lines of Kitten Auth. http://www.thepcspy.com/kittenauth Try it out here. http://www.thepcspy.com/contact

How about something along the lines of Kitten Auth. http://www.thepcspy.com/kittenauth Try it out here. http://www.thepcspy.com/contact

You're thinking of KittenAuth:
http://www.thepcspy.com/kittenauth

Try kittenauth!

Orders of magnitude are powers of 10. I figured that a base XP install is about 2 GB and if AOS4 is ~50 MB that's ~2 orders of magnitude (5 * 10^1 MB compared to 2 * 10^3 MB).

I've been playing around with nLite, but I doubt you could get XP to something under about 1 GB and still have it mostly functional. If you tweak it further then you can get it down to about 200 MB with a fair sacrifice in functionality. Even so, it looks like AOS4 is still only a fourth of that, and a BeOS base install (I mention it because that's what I'm familiar with) is only about 150 MB (and can be reduced to ~50 MB without much of a loss).

That said, you can reduce Windows 2000 to a fairly small size more easily, but it still doesn't boot considerably faster. So not everything is harddrive IO. Windows is probably slower partly because it's doing stuff with applications (preloading IE, Windows Defender, etc.). Just about everything you install will increase boot time.

somebody is trying it over at the KittenAuth project
http://www.thepcspy.com/kittenauth

Why look at women when you could look at kittens:
http://www.thepcspy.com/kittenauth

Identify you're a human by picking the right group of animals from the pictures.
Perhaps /. should use it for their comments posting? :)

the first version of this AFAIK was kitten auth

Will we still be able to mute commercials? Can't care about what they're selling if the volume's off...

Incidently, the captcha slashdot uses is fucking retarded, I hope they replace it w/ KittenAuth, and soon...

You could also go for the cuteness approach:

• Kitten Authentication

Click on the three images which are OMG Kittens and you're identified as human.

kittens