Reid Tatoris on CBC’s Spark
Leave a CommentReid Tatoris, one of the co-founders of Are You a Human, was recently interviewed by the Canadian Broadcasting Company (CBC) on their show Spark. You can listen to it here.
Reid Tatoris, one of the co-founders of Are You a Human, was recently interviewed by the Canadian Broadcasting Company (CBC) on their show Spark. You can listen to it here.
At Are You a Human, our approach to stopping spam is different from CAPTCHA, so I wanted to take some time to explain how it works.
We set out to get rid of those squiggly text CAPTCHAs that everyone hates. We could not just get people to remove them and be done. Those distorted words are there to keep spammers out. We needed to find a way to make it easier for humans but still difficult for computer programs.
Our games were developed with that in mind. They are quick and simple, 10 second challenges with elements that make it difficult for automated attacks. We place multiple images in our game and ask users to interact with them by dragging the correct shapes into the right location. These shapes are generally floating around in the game play area. This means that a computer must accurately identify the correct shape, find it on the screen, move it to the correct location. If there are any errors, we take that into account.
We maintain a variety of games and are always releasing more. These games have different sets of images, mechanics and game play. This keeps it fun for people and helps keep it difficult to create a single program to bypass PlayThru.
The difficulty of these games can be adjusted by adding more shapes, having the objects move faster, lowering the failure threshold and several other factors. Once all of the shapes are dragged in correctly, we end the game by showing a game complete screen.
However, getting to this point does not indicate success or failure. Passing the game is more than just playing the game correctly. We also track user (or bot) interaction with the game, like mouse movement. The data from this interaction is fed into our algorithm that determines a score for how likely it is to be human. This score for the game play is then stored. Once a user submits the game to a site, that site can request information about the success of that particular game. Each site can have different thresholds and settings, and we tell them whether the overall game should pass or fail based on their preferences.
Because our focus is on usability, we keep our games relatively simple and the pass threshold low by default, but we maintain the ability to increase these as needed. We also have multiple games, which makes solving one not as meaningful.
This flexibility is what makes PlayThru so powerful. It is not a one size fits all tool, and we have the ability to evolve our scoring system over time. This flexibility also allows us to constantly add new games, and breaking one game does not break the entire system.
We are always working to improve our scoring system to make it easier for people while keeping the bots at bay. Part of that includes writing bots of our own. However, we welcome those that want to create these bots in collaboration. The more data, we have the smarter the system can be. If you are interested, please email us at support (at) areyouahuman (dot) com, or send us a message in our forum.
If you do not run a website, you probably have not seen what this comment spam looks like. Here is a small sampling of some of the comments bots try to post on our site:
Posted by: online pharmacy canada
“Yesterday, while I was at work, my sister stole my apple ipad and tested to see if it can survive a forty foot drop, just so she can be a youtube sensation. My iPad is now broken and she has 83 views. I know this is totally off topic but I had to share it with someone!”
Posted by: online pharmacy use
“Excellent goods from you, man. I have take note your stuff previous to and you’re just too wonderful. I actually like what you have bought right here, really like what you are saying and the best way during which you are saying it. You’re making it enjoyable and you still care for to keep it wise. I can’t wait to learn much more from you. This is really a great site.”
Posted by: fantastico web host
“Definitely believe that which you said. Your favorite reason seemed to be on the web the simplest thing to be aware of. I say to you, I certainly get irked while people think about worries that they plainly don’t know about. You managed to hit the nail upon the top as well as defined out the whole thing without having side effect , people could take a signal. Will likely be back to get more. Thanks”
These bots post spam comments with links to increase their search rankings. I’ve excluded the links here. They post with lovely email addresses like archive.org/details/CheapKeflexWithoutPrescriptio…archiv004doun@gmail. Before we installed PlayThru, we got upwards of 30 spam comments per day, and we are pretty small.
Recent reports show that ‘Non-Humans’ Account for 51% of All Internet Traffic, including an astounding claim that 2% of all Internet traffic is from comment spammers.
PlayThru can stop these bots and make your website more usable for your users. Go here to start installing PlayThru now!
“RT @Williams_Sandy: @lindapoitevin @parajunkee Gawd, I despise Captcha. It completely keeps me from commenting.”
I saw a tweet this morning that encapsulated why we do what we do at Are You a Human. Why we have an awesome team working super hard to make human verification fun and easy. Why our customers have installed us on their site.
CAPTCHA, the distorted, frustrating, twisted characters, is a horrible solution to a pervasive problem, and for the last 12 years, it was the only option to stop spam. It served its purpose in the beginning, but computers have evolved to be better than humans at figuring out these letters.
In a recent survey, we asked people which option they preferred between reCaptcha and PlayThru. 98% preferred PlayThru. We also surveyed people asking if they enjoyed completing reCaptcha. Only 8.5% said that they enjoyed it. That’s less than the latest congressional approval ratings (among other things)!
Our goal at Are You a Human is to bring back a little humanity to the Internet, to treat people like people instead of automatons, and make the painful experiences online way more fun. Because who doesn’t want a little more fun in their day?
This is why we exist.
In the last few weeks, we have received quite a bit of interest in PlayThru from outside of the United States, from articles and word of mouth and on twitter. It has been great to see such interest in PlayThru and our alternative to CAPTCHA. Apparently others think it is a great replacement, as we do!
We have also received a lot of questions about language support for non-English languages. Here is the current news about language support:
We love hearing about the features that you want in PlayThru, so please keep it coming. In particular, if there a feature you want specifically, please tell us in our support forum.
Keep fighting bots with fun!