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Anti-Spam Webforms Leave Out The Blind
geekee writes "An article on CNET claims that a technique whereby a user enters a code word displayed in an image in order to register for a service such as an e-mail account discriminates against the blind. Advocacy groups for the blind are even hinting at lawsuits against companies using this practice. A proposed audio workaround for the blind still has problems since it has to be garbled to the point where most people can't understand it to prevent a computer from recognizing the letters. Brings up some interesting issues surrounding the Turing test."
What are the "interesting issues surrounding the Turing test?" I don't think generating a poor quality recording of some random word has anything to do with useful artificial intelligence.
No matter what you do to improve conditions for a large group of people, some much smaller group will still be inconvenienced or have their level of inconvenience slightly raised. In this case, we have a very important tool used to fight spammers in their quest to sign up for email accounts automatically. Billions of pieces of spam float around the 'net every day. How many blind people are there?
This reminds me of new 25-cent public bathrooms tested by New York City awhile back. You paid 25 cents to go use it, and it cleaned itself and smelled great and so on. Then people in wheelchairs complained they couldn't use them (because they were too small), and were being discriminated against. So, the company made a larger version. Except now, you had bums popping in a quarter, and having a free room for the night. More lawsuits ensued.
When will it stop?
It's probably worth pointing out that the /. account signup employs just such a technique.
And yes, I can see how this can be viewed as discriminatory, but the problem of devising an alternative is far from trivial.
Jurisprudence Fetishist Gets Off On A Technicality --theonion.com
Huh, I thought this had already been solved? I was reading about this issue on CNN's similar story last week, and they mentioned the outcry from the blind and mute community over this issue. However, they also said Microsoft had already come up for a solution with regards to hotmail (M$'s free internet based e mail service) by simply not applying the test to the blind. WindowsXP checks to see if a Braille translator is hooked up to your computer, and relays this through your .NET passport to Hotmail. If it is, you don't have to go through that mess.
Sounds like a good solution to me! Besides, if they do this for the blind, and use that audio test thing instead, the deaf will be all over them.
Consensual sex is boring.
If we know the target language, then you could produce a challenge based on a sentence. Say something like
...] verb [location] [time]." ... as long as you've got a big enough dictionary that can fill in the blanks, generating these messages as a challenge should be a cinch. an encrypted string in the Subject (which is fairly dependably returned in the reply) could be used to identify the particular message, and the answer could be looked up
"Thirteen red small dogs went to the zoo."
What size were they? (to which the answer would be "small")
You could mix and match questions and adjectives to keep spammers on their toes. The only drawback is that this is only effective for as long as you have a bigger dictionary system than the spammers. Using a larger sentence or paragraph with more complexities should help.
"[count] [color] [size] [age] object [and [count] [color] [size] [age] [object]
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
I sort of assumed there was such a thing all along. Something like those "pinpression" toys with all the parallel pins that you can push on and make an imprint of your hand, only driven by actuators. Why wouldn't this work?
(Hold on...after a little Googling, I found this instance of the exact thing I'm proposing. Go and buy it, blind people! And not just for anti-spam graphics; as with any new medium, just imagine the pr0n possibilities.)
"A great democracy must be progressive or it will soon cease to be a great democracy." --Theodore Roosevelt
This is not discriminatory. And speaking of that, why does every group, sect, division, race, gender, species, think that anything that isn't designed with them in mind is discriminatory? There are simply too many types of people, environments, ethics, laws, and other variables for every system to work equally, or even adequately for every person.
If I were to provide a service (even a paying one) of some sort (for example a dog wash) but then require that any customer that wants to use my service and pay me for it must hop once on their left legg as a way of verifying that they are in fact a biped and not a snake in a human disguise (just go with it). . . this would clearly be discriminatory against people missing their left legg. But that doesn't mean that I am some how liable financially or legally! I just have a clumsy authentication system and need to improve it. If I don't, then the left legged people of my town will go somewhere else to get their dog washed.
robi
The problem with these approaches are that they are broken by design. They *assume* that humans are better at sensory pattern recognition than machines, be it visual or audible. That's doomed to fail, not only because of people having varying degrees of senses, but because computers *invariably* get better and better senses.
So not only is this approach discriminatory, but a short-term measure that won't work in the long run.
What IS unique to humans, that machines have little or no chance to emulate and master in the forseeable future? Abstractions, perhaps? Arts? Or humour? Trivia that can't easily be answered by a machine would be one way to go.
To prove that you're human, answer this:
- In Alice in Wonderland, Alice fell down into a?
- Who's the boss of the strip of land south of Canada?
- To gain access to this site,
please identify,
the type of verse this text is.
- What would be an appropriate response to "Knock, knock"?
- What's the air speed velocity of a coconut-laden swallow?
Even better would be questions without fixed answers:
- What's your name spelled backwards?
- Who won yesterday's baseball match between the Mariners and the Mets?
- How many points did NASDAQ rise or fall yesterday?
- What's tomorrow's date? Please reply in the form "February 13, 2003"?
Block for a minute every time there's a wrong answer, since people are prone to error, but might accept waiting a minute more than a machine would. Add new questions every day, and drop off old ones before they can be fed into machines by humans.
And, most important, provide a human-to-human contact method as a fallback to prove your species, if everything else fails.
Regards,
--
*Art