Zombie Pirate Ninja Monkey

Microsoft on the side of the angels

Microsoft has been working on improving one of the newer methods of authenticating that you're a human.  This undisputably places them on the Goodies side of the room, instead of the Baddies, for once.

You might be fairly certain that you're a human.  I doubt if you've really thought about it to the extent that Baudrillard might want you to, but for most of us, French philosophy stopped being useful after Descartes, so that's not a stumbling block.  So why is it important to be test for it?

Well, spammers try to flood forums and blogs with messages (I am regularly attacked by such a one here, myself), and to make them have to use humans instead of automated agents raises their costs.  And brute-forcing a password system, while easy enough when you are able to automate the process, is much harder when you can't use automation.  Traditionally, people use CAPTCHAs (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart) or HIPs (Human Interactive Proofs).  This is why you see oddly drawn letters that you must fill in when posting to some blogs, or even little, simple sums to complete.

One new method is recognising pictures.  Since Plato, we've thought about how humans are able to recognise novel objects as being of a category that they already understand.  So I can show a swivel-chair to a 3-year-old who has never done time in a cube farm, and they will immediately know that it is a seat.  Some research has been into using pictures of cats and dogs.  Show a human a picture of a dog, and it'll tell you what it is, whether it is a toy poodle or an alsation.  Similarly, we know at a glance that a Persian long-haired Chinchilla and a Siamese are both cats.  Image recognition software can do this, but it is expensive in both time and processor cycles, and presumably hard to procure in Nigeria.  So a new technique is to ask a human to pick out the dogs or cats from a line-up of each.

What one of Microsoft's research groups have done, as is their wont, is to take this idea and make it work better.  One vulnerability is that the picture databases tend to be small, so that a determined spammer can sort the couple of hundred pictures himself.  So Microsoft have procured the help of Petfinder.com, who help re-home more pets than anyone else in the world.  This has given them access to millions of pictures of dogs and cats, already categorised by human volunteers at the shelters.

And this is the really nice touch, that impresses me.  Every single picture is of an animal that is seeking a home.  And under every picture is a link, saying "adopt me", which takes you to Petfinder's site.

So we get a better weapon against spammers, Microsoft gets a neat solution to a problem, and hopefully some more animals find good homes.  You can try the test here, for yourself, just to check that you're human.