NuCaptcha Flash CAPTCHAs to combat spambots
"Completely Automated Public Turing tests to tell Computers and Humans Apart" (CAPTCHA) technology is designed to generate phrases that while still legible to humans, cannot easily be machine read. Its purpose is to defeat the tools spammers and criminals use to automate tasks such as the setting up of accounts in forums and with email services.
Usually static images are used, but the software from NuCaptcha generates animated CAPTCHAs to make automated machine reading even more difficult, while actually increasing legibility for humans. Animated CAPTCHAs themselves aren't new, but animation was only used to do things like hiding part of a character string with a bouncy ball or other graphic objects, or superimposing moving grid lines.
Whether the NuCaptcha approach will be successful remains to be seen. In current demos, the character string to be recognised is always coloured red. Filters could perhaps be used to hide all the other elements, simplifying a subsequent OCR process. The area in which the text is displayed could be established by taking multiple screen shots.
NuCaptcha also promises to thwart the recently appeared large scale CAPTCHA breaking services that employ humans to identify distorted images for spammers. Special algorithms are designed to detect whether the responses originate from the human employee of a breaking service, in which case the animation will be slowed down. Professional CAPTCHA breakers are said to need, on average, four seconds to recognise a CAPTCHA. NuCaptcha is designed to create a 15-second delay if required, which apparently makes breaking unprofitable.
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