Will Strip For Food, Money, and Image Recognition

11Jun/090

Will Strip For Food, Money, and Image Recognition

When did the web go all hallucinogenic? Every form that you have to fill in features a box with squiggly random letters, in all the colours of the rainbow, with some sort of trippy 3D fractal landscape in the background. It’s not there because web designers are fanatical about prog-rock album covers, although that may be true. It’s there to check you are human and it’s called a CAPTCHA, which stands for Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart. Yes, I know that’s a glaring cheat. They must have thought nobody would notice.

The inspiration for CAPTCHAs came from Alan Turing, a British mathematician who designed one of the world’s first computers and whose code-cracking genius helped bring the Second World War to an end. Now his name comes up in a technology that exasperates us with barely decipherable characters to make us prove we are homo sapiens. Disgraceful.

If we have to prove we are human to comment on a blog or get a Hotmail account, it follows that there are non-humans trying to do the same thing. Who are these anti-people? Does their existence prove that we are being visited from other worlds, or that there truly is an abominable snowman? Well, sadly not. They are just computers, known as bots, programmed by plain old humans to send us spam and litter the web with unwelcome advertising. Set up a forum or blog today and the spam-bots will find you long before any real people come along.

This evokes a bizarre scenario where, if all the humans stopped visiting the web, the computers could continue chatting amongst themselves for decades to come. If they could evolve to advertise stuff computers need like hard drives and monitors, rather than willy enlargers and Nigerian bank scams, we could have a whole new economy going on.

Anyway, that can’t happen – because computers can’t figure out CAPTCHAs. Hackers and scammers, however, aren’t known for giving up easily, and have circumvented this security idea with a great piece of lateral thinking: just use humans to decipher the fuzzy images. But who would sit at a computer all day squinting at wobbly letters? Well, either third-world workers paid a pittance or – and you can almost taste the irony here – you and me.

So how can you make people do something they hate, not just once, but over and over again? Simple. You show them a picture of an attractive lady and say she’ll take her clothes off if they solve a CAPTCHA. They do that, she takes a little something off, then you give them another CAPTCHA. And that’s exactly what a group of hackers did – they wrote a virus, detected by security firm Trend Micro in October 2007, which infected computers and enticed users, via a sequence of striptease images, to solve lots of CAPTCHAs for them – which they could then use to register email accounts and send out spam.

With clever ideas like that these hackers could go far in the world, but most employers want people with a stronger moral compass. That said, they would fit right into the banking industry. Or politics.