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Comment by ColinWright | Hacker News Reader

    To prevent abuse, we need to ensure that
    everyone taking the 8^8 test is a human
    and not a bot. Click on all of the icons
    below that represent animals.

And then the site is so slow it only shows me 5 of 7 images, the other two failing to load.

Good one.

Don't get me wrong, it's a cute idea, although I have to say that I'm not sure I'd get along with someone who thinks exactly as I do.

Edit: I've passed the spam test and started the "test" - most of the answers are "none of the above" or "any one of these 4". The usual frustrating experience. I mean:

    THE KEY TO BEING SUCCESSFUL IN LIFE IS ...

How should I know?

View on HN

Yeah, I can't seem to pass the spam test either.

Looks like you found eachother.

A friendship forged at a manufacturing plant?

A friendship forged out of 7075 aluminum alloy?

And if there are always 3 animals (like on mine), then one out of every 35 (= 7 choose 3) bots will get through it anyway. Even if each picture is uniformly and independently an animal or non-animal, one out of every 128 bots will get through. If bots are a problem, maybe use a stronger captcha.

It sounds like a neat idea but it's taking too long to load for me to check it out. I'll try again later.

I got two animals and a bird.

Whether I click on just the animals or all three of them is part of the test, right?

Birds are very much animals, both colloquially and scientifically: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal

I think you may have mis-read 'animal' as 'mamaml' A bird is an animal.

That either assumes a spammer makes the effort to program his bot to handle this problem or a bot so intelligent that it can interpret what this "proof you're human" task entails.

The second, I think, can be ignored for now. The first is fairly unlikely, given the current popularity of the site and what a spammer stands to gain (hm, maybe there is quite somewhat to gain. One could register a few million different fake profiles, and use them to find gullible clients for a "I would like to come and visit you, but need money for the trip" scam. Edit: maybe, this whole site is part of such a scam)

Also, if I were to make my bot aware of this "I'm human" test, I also would program in knowledge of the URLs or the pixels of the pictures used, and get a 100% success rate.

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