CAPTCHA's, Gamers, Spam + bots

CAPTCHA's - almost anyone who uses the Internet has run into these kinds of man/machine "interfaces". (Chart shows evidence of Russian cyber attack on Georgian servers in August 2008). The embedded Google Video presentation was from 2004 - and if I am not mistaken sometimes after that Google offered this "image naming game" to any Gmail account holder. (I played it a few times to see what it was about. It was not as full featured as the experimental ESP Game as described by Dr. Luis Von Ahn).


His thesis that we need to improve the "parasitic" relationship1 most of us have with the web - and using "gaming" to motivate volunteers is a very good concept. Think of the number of hours that kids today spend playing games on the net!

The purpose of the talk is to explain "Asymmetric Player Verified" games2 that can harness human interaction to solve unique problems that have eluded computers. That it may support the idea of the movie "The Matrix" that computers realize they have to keep us around because we generate power was a nice ending - considering the talk was sponsored by Google.

The rest of PChucks blog refers to his other musings on bots, spammers and how they may evolve in the future3. Very good article.

Here is link to presentation (Google Video).

[Update: Exposing India's CAPTCHA Solving Economy and this article reveals that spammers are converting 92% of Microsoft, 90% of Google and 58% of Yahoo email account CAPTCHA's.]

Footnotes:
1) Dr. Ahn's fact that it took 9 million man-hours to build the Empire State Building and 20 million man-hours for the Panama Canal were compared to the estimated 9 billion hours Microsoft customers have spent playing Solitare online.

2) Some of the websites mentioned in presentation were: www.captcha.net, www.espgame.org and www.peekaboom.org. In particular I found a free CAPTCHA service very useful for hiding my email adress from spam crawlers. They regularly crawl bogs like this looking for victims and although I knew the risks I had no simple way to foil them - until now. I highly recommend this free service.

3) In particular this blog by a Russian security expert is downright un-nerving - worse is that he refers to Captcha's being broken in 2007!