Microsoft, utilizing cat images to repel spammers

Microsoft has finally succeeded in developing forbidden cutting-edge technology to decide which spam mails are received by kitten picking up the received e-mails one after another at high speed, and the e-mail automatically judged as spam by the cat automatically cat By adding images, cat icons are displayed on the mail software, not all the world's cat love mail users are greatly impressed,HotmailIt uses a cat image so that spammers can not run the automatic account creation program when creating an account of.

Details of what is as follows.
Kittens Could Solve Spam - Yahoo! News

Currently, when you try to create a Hotmail account, you need to enter the following crooked characters.


This is commonly referred to as "Captcha"Capture" is an authentication method that can be read and input easily by humans, but in the case of programs it is difficult to break through this, so a mass account that spammers use to send spam mails It can prevent activities of the fully automatic creation program. The effect appeared from the first day of introducing this mechanism (called Human Interactive Proofs, HIPs at Microsoft), and it seems that the creation rate of new accounts has decreased by 20%.

However, spammers began to develop advanced technologies such as so-called OCR, the development of technology to read characters from images, guessing character strings from the displayed images themselves, and there is a need to devise yet another idea It was.

For that reason, Microsoft has thought about a means to display more than a few images and to select a particular one from among them to determine whether it is a human being or a spammer program. An image of a kitty cat comes out as an example. Which of the multiple images will you let the user click "with which cat?" Of course Microsoft already has a huge amount of images, so it seems quite difficult to break through this.

The actual example is below.

Example Service: Signup Page

This system, "Asirra" is explained on the following page.

MSR Asirra Project - Installation

Moreover, this image generation method is also skillfully skillful, and in the case of a cat image, it seems that a movie which the cat actually jumps up is taken frequently, and an image is generated from it. Therefore, a new cat image is generated infinitely one after another. Also, it seems possible to use short movies instead of images if cost allows.

In addition, similar image authentication methods that are already available are as follows.

Human Auth