Fend Off Trolls, Bots and Jerks With ‘Empathy’ Test

(x) technical ( ) legislative ( ) market-based ( ) vigilante

approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which vary from state to state.)

( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses ( ) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected ( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money ( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks (x) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it ( ) Users of email will not put up with it ( ) Microsoft will not put up with it ( ) The police will not put up with it ( ) Requires too much cooperation from spammers (x) Requires cooperation from too many of your friends and is counterintuitive ( ) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once ( ) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers ( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists ( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business ( ) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever worked ( ) Other:

Specifically, your plan fails to account for

( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it ( ) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email ( ) Open relays in foreign countries ( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses (x) Asshats ( ) Jurisdictional problems ( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes ( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money ( ) Huge existing software investment in SMTP ( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack ( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email ( ) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes ( ) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches ( ) Extreme profitability of spam ( ) Joe jobs and/or identity theft ( ) Technically illiterate politicians ( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers (x) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves ( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering ( ) Outlook ( ) Other:

and the following philosophical objections may also apply:

( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable ( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation ( ) Blacklists suck ( ) Whitelists suck ( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored ( ) Countermeasures cannot involve wire fraud or credit card fraud ( ) Countermeasures cannot involve sabotage of public networks ( ) Sending email should be free ( ) Why should we have to trust you and your servers? ( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses (x) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem ( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome ( ) I don't want the government reading my email ( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough ( ) Other:

Furthermore, this is what I think about you:

(x) Nice try, dude, but I don't think it will work. ( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it. ( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your house down!

Obviously, there's a big gap between writing an essay and typing a single word. Supposedly, the trigger was having to consider the reasoning behind a position, which you don't have to do to type just one word. But who knows, maybe the cumulative effect could actually do something.

Note also that this isn't a real captcha, in the traditional sense. It doesn't work by keeping the trolls out. It works by making them slightly less troll-ish, through repeated exposure. While outwardly similar, it's a very different model, and you would not expect any immediate effect.

They make it very easy to scrape too. The question text is plain text (no need to OCR that) and you can run that through your favorite NLP package to extract useful structure to work from. The answers are each displayed as individual images on the page, making it trivial to know how many possible answers there are. That also makes it easier to run your favorite OCR package on the individually sliced images.

Always glad to see people cracking away at this problem though. It's great fodder for machine learning enthusiasts.

Mu.

Obviously it's dead simple to guess the 'correct' answer.

But wrapping it in a faux test of one's humanness is an off-putting premise, that can come across morally condescending (which probably wasn't the intention).

While I support civil rights and the group behind it is probably well intentioned, it doesn't follow automatically that this instance of execution is a good idea.

Also, it's probably fallacious to assume only 3 emotions (or any at all for that matter), are occurring in the user.

"meh", "bored" or "mildly annoyed" etc, are perfectly valid answers too, and does not mean we are jerks for feeling that way :p

Fun fact about people with no empathy: they are often profoundly skilled at feigning empathy when they feel they are being tested for it.

Most captchas work because the words they present to users are mostly random assortments of letters. This one, however, presents real dictionary words. It is pretty conceivable that a bot, armed with a dictionary file, would have a pretty high rate of success correctly identifying at least one of the three words.

If it then randomly chooses one of the identified words, it would have a rate of success at solving the captcha nearing 33%. This is extremely high when your bot is trying to solve thousands of captchas per minute.

The problem is that the questions need to be very clever to avoid giving away the site's bias (and thus the answers).

I don't think it's effective against bots either. If a bot can read the three options it has a 1/3 chance of getting it right (assuming that the bot would choose randomly). In fact from the sample captcha it looks like one of the words is not like the others and therefore you could possibly eliminate that making it a 50:50 chance (again assuming it picks it randomly, that there's an odd one out, and that the odd one out is unrelated to the text above).

Although, I suppose that the idea of the captcha is to show awareness, rather than actually stop spam or trolling. It's neat, but not a great spamkiller.

Anyways, point is, although it's a good idea, I don't see it being either wide-spread or significantly more effective than re-CAPTCHA, et al., nor do I see it 'aiding' in emotion, so to speak.

But, I would love for someone to prove me wrong on this, because it is an interesting approach.

Also even with a serious question DB, it would be extremely easy to crack, because of the small pool of answer words and the fact that it's always the negative one you're supposed to pick. With such a low entropy problem, some basic ML and it would be over.

What if they asked questions about workers in Chinese factories?

D'oh!

Over-stating the security implications of their system for the purposes of getting press for an upcoming event is short-sighted.