Spammers Hate Kittens

Ah CAPTCHA… The double-edged sword that stops spammers but discourages commenters has been increasingly vulnerable to bots. However, finally a real solution has appeared:

So he came up with KittenAuth, a test that requires the user to identify which three out of nine pictures contain kittens. The “3 in 9″ grid leaves the poor spambot with only a one in 84 chance of randomly picking the right answer.

Since you can vary the grid size and also the questions, you can easily pump up the difficulty. If you regularly rotated your kitten pictures, it would be harder for a non-AI bot to figure out which pictures are kittens. Imagine being the person in charge of browsing for cute kitten pictures all day, in order to fight spammers…

Elsewhere Online | Kabitzin 4/16/2008