It's 2007. We are no longer alone in cyberspace. And our new neighbours are not like us.
Computer programs, developed by spammers, are around us every day. They try to fill our forums, our guestbooks and our comment sections with hyperlinks to viagrashops, onlinecasinos and porn sites.
In order to proof we are humans, we are forced to spend valuable lifetime with mind-numbing tasks like character recognition.
It's time to resist. It's time to have fun! Let's change this game together!
If you cannot imagine our foes, try to think of the orc armies in lord of the rings. Our enemies are successful because they come in unimaginable numbers and can crunch numbers really, really fast.
In the first years of our struggle against them, we learned that we have to differentiate between them (the machines) and us. Captchas were invented. Humans spent a lot of their times painstakingly reading scrambled letters to prove they are human.
And still, it seems futile: The machines are getting better at reading text from images. So the Captchas are made harder. My friends and fellow humans, I am 27 and sometimes I am not so sure if I should read "Q" or "0" from those Captchas. How is my mother supposed to do this? Why are we spending our leisure time like this? We start to feel like the ones doing the test, and they, the spammers with their bots, are driving the game.
We say No! Humans should not need to engage in machine-like repeating tasks to proof they are human. After all, machines love repeating the same task over and over. We do not.
There has to be another way. And we believe we know where to go from here.
We think it is possible to
- create a mechanism that spambots will not crack until they have become general-problem solvers
- make it fun for humans to use this mechanism
How could this work? Read on...