Did you ever felt that the Captcha forms are trying to send you a message?

These funny captcha rage comics were taken from Anon Gallery website.

The result is Yo!CAPTCHA, a captcha advertisement tool where the user gets to answer a question that relates directly to the advertisement banner instead of solving a standard captcha test, the advertiser gets the users’ full attention, and the publisher can make money and prevent spam at the same time.

Yo!Captcha story beginning is similar to many other startup beginnings: in early 2011 three new graduates of the BITS Pilani engineering college sat in their dorm rooms and wondered how to monetize captcha, an unused and highly visited internet space (about 300 million CAPTCHA forms are being filled everyday worldwide they say), and then they came up with Yo!Captcha.

The captcha advertising tool currently has Wordpress, Joomla and Drupal plugins, and it has been in used for by several local websites, but the team plans to convince bigger advertisers with the underused potential of the Captcha forms as advertising space.

Luis von Ahn, an associate professor at Carnegie Mellon University, who is best known for co-inventing the original Captcha test, and later atoning for his sins by creating the reCaptcha, is one of the five winners of the 2011 Grace Murray Hopper Award.

Professor von Ahn was awarded for “advances in harnessing the human side of computation to solve problems that neither humans nor computers could solve alone.” Coining the term CAPTCHA, “the world’s most ubiquitous computer security program” and developing the reCaptcha, which uses humans in digitizing parts of books “for which optical character recognition (OCR) algorithms fall short ”, were named among his achievements alongside pioneering the idea of crowdsourcing and creating “Games with a Purpose to harness human gameplay for tackling challenging image recognition problems.”

The Grace Murray Hopper Award comes with a money prize of $35,000, donated by Google. Google is also the current owner of Luis von Ahn former company, reCaptcha, after buying it in 2009.

“As Pinterest grows, spammers have also grown within our community.” Said a recent Pinterest blogpost that encouraged users to, well, tell on suspicious users, “While the technology we use to detect spam becomes more advanced each day, we want Pinners to know what to do in case you come across suspicious content or links.”

image source: searchenginejournal.com

Surprisingly enough, up until recently, Pinterest, founded in March 2010 and on January 2012 was already recognized as the fastest growing social network online, was not using any spam prevention methods, and no captcha was involved in the entire pinning process, which mainly includes publishing of images, often taken from the web.

Now, veteran Pinterested users were surprised to meet a captcha form in their Pinterest routine. It usually happened following an intensive pinning or an attempt to place a link on the description box, what could be easily interpreted as either a spam or a credit to the image source.

Moreover, according to several Pinterest users complaints, there is something wrong with its robots’ detection system, as it did not recognize them as humans and did not them allow them to resume their pinning (or spamming), despite successfully deciphering the captcha code.

PlayThru’s Are you Human, currently on its Beta version, was developed based on a couple conventions: one, that humans, unlike bots, can play; and second, that everybody hates captcha. “We use game mechanics to create an experience that is more enjoyable than solving that awful squiggly text.” To support their claim against the standard captcha, their website presents a “rogues gallery”, an open captchas hall of fame that exemplifies how awful those squiggly texts can be.

The captcha game promises up 40% increase in form submissions comparing to the standard textual captcha and advertisers are promised 100% interaction with users. As in captcha advertisement, PlayThru’s captcha game can increase brand awareness and enhance user’s engagement.

Though PlayThru is an essentially a visual captcha, it offers solutions to the color blinds and the visually impaired. Are you Human is currently compatible with Wordpress, Drupal and various scripting languages including PHP, Perl, and others.

Apparently, Google is running a reCaptcha experiment in which they are trying to decipher blurry street addresses from Google Street View for Google Maps, and to prevent spam at the same time.

What is ReCaptcha Again?

As you recall, recpatcha is a system that uses Captchas to digitize printed text that is not readable by computers or bots. The system was developed by the same team that developed captcha and was acquired by Google in 2009. ReCaptcha has been used to digitize content for Google books and Google News.

Google has been using the street address types of recaptchas besides the traditional blurry text recaptcha, mainly on its keyword tool. The recapthca images frequently include street number signs but also street names and traffic signs. These images are taken from Google Street view and they are used to improve Google Maps accuracy.

Google says they will continue to use images in recaptchas depneding on the results of this street view recaptcha experiment. “Based on the data and results of these reCaptcha tests, we’ll determine if using imagery might also be an effective way to further refine our tools for fighting machine and bot-related abuse online.”

Source: TechCrunch

Facebook users have to be constantly aware of these scams, otherwise it might cause inconvenience, at the least, as they might be the victims of some of the most ordinary scams. But constant learning might be of some help for the users and a trouble for the scammers. Now they have to device new ways to lure users to fall for these unnecessary links.

Overall Process Involved in the Facebook Captcha Scam:

Nowadays researchers have recognized a new survey scam on Bit Defender, which is employing a false CAPTCHA for the purpose of spreading deceptive love. The particular message displayed there is: “PHOTO! Girl accidentally sends dad SMS about her FIRST time! (This is the funniest thing ever!)”.

When you click on the link, you have been taken to a YouTube page where a dialogue window asks you to fill in the text present in the CAPTCHA image. By looking thoroughly on the “submit” lettering, you can find out the word “comment” behind the large “submit” writing. This thing can serve as a clue that something unusual is happening here.

After hitting the “submit” button, different types of surveys will get displayed before you finish the process of confirming that you are human. This is the only way you can get access to the particular photo. Additionally, the same message gets posted to the Facebook wall of the victim. This is done for the sake of involving the Facebook friends of the particular user in the same scam.

Thus, the users have to be constantly aware of the current pages, in order to avoid these scams. As aforesaid, you only have to complete just one survey. This is all these scammers require. And this is all you have to avoid.

Versions of Wordpress Supported by Blue Captcha:

The versions of WordPress which are supported by blue captcha are WP 2.8.6 or any later version. It might support some earlier versions as well, but it has not been checked yet. However, it works successfully with WordPress 2.8.6, 3.0, 3.2.1 and 3.3.1.

Important Features:

One of its most significant features includes its application to the login form, commentary form, password recovery form and registration form. You can select from its seven predefined Captcha difficulty levels. You can also modify your captcha settings and make a custom level. The captcha gets displayed only to the registered or non-registered users. Also before its application, the captcha image can be previewed.

In addition to this, five different fonts as well as background images are supported by blue captcha. Similarly, the particular plugin supports single or double captcha layer. It has the capacity of exhibiting almost 20 characters on captcha images. On the captcha image, it can also add additional drawings like grid, circles, lines and transparent lines.

It has the capacity to keep log file, which deals with all activities relevant to user registrations, password recovery, user logins and user comments. It is also capable of providing options relevant to blocking. By using the log file, it can easily find the IP address of spammers. In this way these spammers and unwanted persons can be banned for ever.

The article checked how many of the comments in a website are actually spam when there’s no CAPTCHA on that website. Then it checked how much spam there is and how many conversions are failed when the CAPTCHA is turned on in those websites.

The results were as followed:

When there’s no CAPTCHA in a website, 4.1% of the conversions were spam and there were no fails.

When CAPTCHA was on, spam went down to close to 0%, but failed conversions were 7.3% of all conversions.

Henry’s conclusion was that CAPTCHA is not recommended:

“Given the fact that many clients count on conversions to make money, not receiving 3.2% of those conversions could put a dent in sales.  Personally, I would rather sort through a few SPAM conversions instead of losing out on possible income.”

We can see the logics behind Henry’s conclusion.

Actually, that is just another good reason to use our Slide-to-Fit CAPTCHA.

With Slide-to-Fit CAPTCHA, spam still goes down to 0%, but the CAPTCHA is easier to solve by human-beings, it is less annoying or frustrating, so conversion rates are much higher.

This must be the best solution to both problems: Spam is zero, conversion rate is still high.

Now there’s another type of CAPTCHA: A mind breaking one.

According to LA Times the best defense against spammers and bots is a (extremely hard) math CAPTCHA. The website of the Croatian Ruđer Bošković Institute is doing just that, while entering the institute’s Quantum Random Bit Generator service. This is the CAPTCHA you get when logging into the service:

Math Captcha

Oh, yeah. It probably works against bots and I don’t think any human spammer or abuser will have the energy or time to solve this.

Efficient? Useful? Probably so.

Annoying? You bet. I think this equation will be a task even for the smartest scientist, only because it takes some time to solve, just for the mean purpose of going to another page you’re interested in.

Lucky for you, if you have a website you don’t need this. AdsCaptcha’s Slide-to-Fit CAPTCHA is just as efficient, but not as annoying. Actually, it’s way more fun.