Hacker News Reader

Comment by matheist | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

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.

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com