{"id":154,"date":"2008-03-05T16:56:10","date_gmt":"2008-03-05T23:56:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/eriknovales.com\/blog\/index.php\/2008\/03\/05\/cats-and-dogs\/"},"modified":"2008-03-05T16:56:10","modified_gmt":"2008-03-05T23:56:10","slug":"cats-and-dogs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/eriknovales.com\/?p=154","title":{"rendered":"Cats and Dogs"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>By way of <a href=\"http:\/\/www.codinghorror.com\/blog\/archives\/001067.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">this Coding Horror article<\/a> discussing recent <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Captcha\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">CAPTCHA<\/a> breaks in Yahoo, Hotmail, and Google, I stumbled across the <a href=\"http:\/\/research.microsoft.com\/asirra\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Asirra<\/a> (Animal Species Image Recognition for Restricting Access) project at <a href=\"http:\/\/research.microsoft.com\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Microsoft Research<\/a>. It&#8217;s a CAPTCHA system that uses pictures of cats and dogs, taken from <a href=\"http:\/\/www.petfinder.com\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Petfinder<\/a>, to filter out bots from real people. I decided to try using it instead of <a href=\"http:\/\/wordpress.org\/extend\/plugins\/cryptographp\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">my current CAPTCHA<\/a> for comments, and, after some wrangling and debugging, got it to work. I have to say I find it much more amusing and stress-free than picking out bizarrely-mangled words amongst a field of visual noise.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.diovo.com\/?p=24#more-24\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Another blogger<\/a> seems to take a dim view of Asirra, but I think his main criticism (being able to defeat the CAPTCHA by enlisting users of a legitimate site and storing the results keyed to an <a href=\"http:\/\/www.eecs.berkeley.edu\/~mjohnson\/abstracts\/hashing.htm\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">image hash<\/a>) is something that could be addressed in several different ways. I thought about cropping and rotating the images, and then, after a brief search, found <a href=\"http:\/\/research.microsoft.com\/~kivancm\/publications\/spdrm01.pdf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">this paper<\/a> whose results suggest that those may be viable options to defeat image hashing algorithms. This is definitely another &#8220;arms race&#8221; situation where spammers will keep developing new techniques to defeat &#8220;human authentication,&#8221; but I think Asirra is a pretty decent idea, and, like I said earlier, a lot more fun than a traditional CAPTCHA.<\/p>\n<p>I hope you like it!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>By way of this Coding Horror article discussing recent CAPTCHA breaks in Yahoo, Hotmail, and Google, I stumbled across the Asirra (Animal Species Image Recognition for Restricting Access) project at Microsoft Research. It&#8217;s a CAPTCHA system that uses pictures of cats and dogs, taken from Petfinder, to filter out bots from real people. I decided [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-154","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-development"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/eriknovales.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/154","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/eriknovales.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/eriknovales.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/eriknovales.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/eriknovales.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=154"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/eriknovales.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/154\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/eriknovales.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=154"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/eriknovales.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=154"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/eriknovales.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=154"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}