Jan-Krueger.net

CAPTCHAs: these warped images you have to copy text out of in order to submit comments on an ever-growing number of websites.

The warped image approach has a number of serious flaws. Firstly, there is a strong correlation between the difficulty bots have with extracting the code from the image and the difficulty humans have with extracting the code from the image. In some cases, I hear it’s actually easier for machines than it is for humans.

Secondly, blind people and people without graphical output on their computers are automatically banned from your CAPTCHA-protected system. Bad.

A different approach is needed. Text-based CAPTCHAs, however, would likely require a knowledge base that challenges are generated from, and due to technical limitations, that knowledge base would probably be finite. A finite knowledge base means that it can probably be inferred from a decent number of challenges.

Some other approaches, such as Hashcash-style challenges, require that the user’s computer solves a difficult mathematical problem which ensures that it will be busy for quite a while until the correct solution is obtained (and the challenge can thus be passed). Again, this results in problems with accessibility.

Luckily, there is an alternative family of approaches that make spamming absolutely infeasible without causing any of the typical accessibility issues. As you know, spamming only pays off due to the ludicrously large number of places you can put your advertisements. Were said places to implement a disincentive to placing a large number of ads, spam would instantly leave them alone.

Enter the disincentive-based solution: ccCAPTCHA. Developed by myself, it works by charging commenters a certain monetary value. All the user has to do is supply their credit card number. You can now test ccCAPTCHA online at my ccCAPTCHA prototype site. On that page, I’m also making the technical parts of ccCAPTCHA available to other interested webmasters. And it’s all for free!

You’re welcome.

Please read carefully the following important message that does not come from the anonymous persons running whyfirefoxisblocked.com and whydiggisblocked.com.

You’ve reached this page because the site you were trying to visit now blocks visitors from the human race and other beings capable of browsing the web.

The users on continents such as America, Asia, Europe and Antarctica openly endorse critical thinking, a function of the human brain that allows humans to ignore irrelevant perceptions such as advertisement on web sites, and are well known for paying no huge amount of money to the owners of sites they visit. Humans that ignore all advertisement are an infringement of the rights of web site owners and developers. Numerous web sites exist in order to provide quality content in exchange for displaying ads, humans who don’t click on these ads are stealing bandwidth without paying for it and website owners deserve a method to block this unauthorized bandwith theft.

Since the human brain does not allow website owners a method for excluding perceptions and do not obey “give away all your money” law, abiding webmasters are forced to block all humans. Demographics have shown that not only are humans a somewhat small and insignificant percentage of the planet, they actually are even smaller in terms of value, therefore blocking these beings seems to have only minimal financial drawbacks, whereas ending resource theft has tremendous financial rewards for honest, hard-working website owners and developers.

If you wish to view the site you came from we suggest stopping being human and becoming a machine instead.

(Of course, humans using Digg are where the real evil is at.)