Earthlink adopts reverse Turing Test to halt spam

This is incredibly cool. Last year, I wrote a piece for Wired about how Yahoo was stopping spambots by creating a reverse Turing Test: Before you can get a free Yahoo email account, you have to prove you’re a human. How do you do that? By asking users to answer a simple visual-recognition question — i.e. recognizing the text in a graphic image. Even a five-year-old can easily do this, but almost no robots can, because visual recognition is something that’s incredibly hard for machines to do.

Since then, I’ve written more about this topic; recently, I posted an interaction with a customer-service bot where I successfully determined that I was in fact talking to real, live person. And during a particularly cool discussion here about phones, Franco suggested a very cool Reverse Turing Test to use to thwart telemarketers — by demanding anyone who calls you out of the blue prove that they’re human:

I’ve been thinking about how to do this with email for a while now. The charge doesn’t have to be that high to deter systematic marketers without posing much problem for random contacts. The key, though, is to make it virtually painless for almost anyone to contact you out of the blue.

With email, another idea is to simply authenticate humanness with something like the reverse turing test blogged here a while back (http://www.collisiondetection.net/mt/archives/000164.html). I’ve thought about automatically bouncing unrecognized email with such a test and asking the sender to resend with the answer to a reverse turing test kind of question. I suppose it’s probably not that hard to do that with a phone these days, either, but it’s much harder to generalize it to any phone that might be calling you. Maybe an audible turing test: you get a recording that asks you to pass some simple test, like dial a specific 2 digit number. However, the test is read by a stuttering drunk.

So today’s big news is … Earthlink is going to try precisely this technique as a way of thwarting spam! According to today’s USA Today:

Here’s how it works: Anyone who sends e-mail to a challenge-response user quickly receives an e-mail asking them to prove they are a live person. They do so by copying a series of numbers displayed on their computer screen and returning the message. Their original message is then allowed through. Verification needs to be performed just once, and future e-mails from the same e-mail address are recognized. Blocked messages are sent to a suspect mailbox, which customers can view.

The system lets users create approved e-mail address lists so family, friends and business associates are spared e-mail challenges. It also has a feature to generate additional e-mail addresses to purchase goods online.Many vendors send sales-confirmation notices via e-mail.

I love this. As we live in a world populated by more and more bots, we’ll be developing increasingly more techniques for figuring out who’s real and who isn’t. Some of it may even become experiential, rather than technological. We may find that a crucial technique for navigating the everyday world is a sort of “bot-sense” — being able to intuit whether someone who’s talking to us on the phone, sending us an email, or chatting with us online, is truly a human.


blog comments powered by Disqus

Search This Site


Bio:

I'm Clive Thompson, a writer on science, technology, and culture. This blog collects bits of offbeat research I'm running into, and musings thereon.

Currently, I'm a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine and a columnist for Wired magazine. I also write for Fast Company and Wired magazine's web site, among other places. Email or AOL IM me (pomeranian99) to say hi or send in something strange!

More of Me

Twitter
Tumblr
Flickr


Recent Entries

A long German word for “noticing when ads are being customized based on your surfing history”

Gay squid sex

“El Ajedrecista” — an analog chess-playing computer from 1912

Hacking the Model T

“How did you find my site?” and Vannevar Bush’s memex

» visit the Collision Detection archives

Clive Thompson's Tumblr
a bunch of stuff

May 20, 2011 » 02:28 PM

From Christopher Kennedy’s very droll book “Neitzsche’s Horse”.

July 28, 2010 » 07:35 AM
“Wr” - S

July 06, 2010 » 10:05 AM

My Xbox broke, and I was trying to Google some possible technical solutions, when I noticed that Google appears to be encouraging me to make a typo. I suppose it’s possible that Google’s algorithms know that typing “wont” instead of “won’t” would produce better results.

June 29, 2010 » 05:00 PM

On the other hand, when I tried the test for multitasking, I was pretty abysmal. I performed worse than people who identify themselves as heavy multitaskers, and those who identify as low multitaskers.

June 29, 2010 » 04:58 PM

I finally got around to trying out the interactive “test your distractability and multitasking” page at the New York Times, which they put up alongside their story earlier this month about how computer distractions are eroding our lives. 

According to the test, I guess I have good focus — I’m not very distractable! 

» visit my Tumblr

Recent Comments

Photos

» see all of my photos on Flickr

Collision Detection: A Blog by Clive Thompson