Awwww....

[jwildstr]

You know those wonderful bot-fooling images? The ones where you need to type the nonsense string hidden on a grid with random lines on top? Someone found it frustrating (and, presumably, not cute enough) and came up with KittenAuth.

Of course, I think the current use of kittens is more for the cutesy value, but it actually seems like a pretty good

Comments

[jwildstr]

Well, if by "the technical issues" you mean why this is needed, it's to keep spammers from having a script sign them up for millions of hotmail/yahoo/etc. accounts to send spam from. Currently, they (and TicketMaster, and so on) use words, letters, numbers, etc. on a patterned background, or wavy letters, or something, because it's currently Very Hard(TM) for a computer to make out the letters with interference (although I'm guessing it's getting easier). However, it's really easy to generate one of those by computer.

If you mean the difficulty in creating something like this, there probably isn't much, except to have a good sizable set of pictures of kittens and non-kittens (or street signs and non-street signs, or trees and non-trees...) so that a spammer can't easily get copies of them all and just tell his script "If you see files of these sizes whose contents look like this, those are the kittens/signs/trees."

[wanderingpixie]

Sooooo cute.

But I doubt it's nearly as secure as the other thing, unfortunately. I don't remember enough combinatorics to do the math, but this one is only a matter of picking the right 1/3 of the pictures. The obnoxious word one is typing in a string of unknown length in the proper order with something like 36 or more options for each member of the string.

But, yeah, definitely a more enjoyable option than trying to read the non-word through the lines ^_^