Monday 21 January 2013

New approach to CAPTCHA - with ads!

Minteye, an Israeli start-up has come up with a new form of CAPTCHA - those annoying squiggly alphanumeric patterns that supposedly allow a web site to be sure that the user is human. What's more it has a business model attached to it. Minteye's variant is known as SLIDING CAPTCHA. The user adjusts a slider until a distorted image looks like something recognisable. The business angle is to include adverts in the human resolved image. Whether it is taken up will probably depend a lot on how well it can discriminate the human user but sometimes a good business model will trump security in the market. However, only last week it seems a short Python script was concocted to defeat it. But these things can never be perfect. And if a machine ever passes the Turing test how can CAPTCHAs hope to work?

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