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New captcha system uses empathy to block bots (and sociopaths)

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app103:
Also, even if it worked well, it would be of very limited use. Most businesses do not want to make people feel awful while on their site. Not good for business, even if the reason for feeling bad is not directly related to the company.

Think about it...

A company spends a great deal of money to present themselves positively and make you feel good about their company, products, etc. Then as soon as you are ready to create an account and buy, they shatter that good feeling with something that makes you feel bad...a captcha that tells you that someone somewhere is being hurt by civil rights abuses. Now you don't feel like shopping any more.

And not everyone shares the same empathy, and the questions may turn off a would be customer, that decides to shop elsewhere because their religious values do not match the correct answer to your question. You could say, "screw them, I don't want to deal with sociopaths and backwards thinking people, any way." But you probably need their business if you want to be profitable.

Good moods are profitable...bad moods are not. Unless the questions can be customized by the business, to ensure the continuation of the warm fuzzies they desire to create, this captcha system will be rejected by them. Unless Joe's Lug Nuts can create his own questions that for instance, tell you something nice about his product or business and ask you how you feel about it, it will end up hurting most businesses that try to use it.

The only businesses that can probably get away with using something like this is a business that is based on providing a product sold on the basis of compassion. For example, overpriced, crap quality umbrellas, sold with the idea that a portion of the profits will go to help people in need...they can get away with something like this.

Nice analysis App, I was thinking similar kinds of things. With a little work you could even do it with actual language processing. The bot would ignore the "smoke" (____ ____ from ____ ____  thinks that ...)

Then you could process about 5 words and then examine the answers.
-TaoPhoenix (October 07, 2012, 02:49 AM)
--- End quote ---

The question is irrelevant and not needed to solve it. The logic to create the captcha relies on scoring the question as either positive or negative, then selecting a random matching emotion word from the database as the correct answer and 2 random words from the opposing database as incorrect answers. The questions may change, but the emotion word database will most likely not.

It's just a question of "Which one of these 3 words is not like the others?" which is something computers can be really good at solving.

Fred Nerd:
Dislike this. I try to keep my opinions reasonably to myself, but if any site brought up the whole gay question and wanted me to say I was appalled that someone says gays should be beat [sic] with a stick, I would find next site. A bit tactless topic

Click only if you agree to take this as a personal opinon that I'm not trying to force on anyone and only mention because it affects my reaction to the CAPTCHA
SpoilerThis isn't because I want gays beatEN with a stick, but because I want gay sympathisers beaten with a stick. Especially the ones who think its so black and white that they only give you 2 emotional choices.

Renegade:
+1 for Fred Nerd

SpoilerThe either/or dilemma is a lame tactic used by people that are trying to push an agenda, are lazy, or perhaps just stupid.

This is from "Industrial Society and Its Future" (PDF here), and nicely illustrates part of the problem:


11. (fr) When someone interprets as derogatory almost anything that is said about him (or about groups with whom he identifies) we conclude that he has inferiority feelings or low self-esteem. This tendency is pronounced among minority rights activists, whether or not they belong to the minority groups whose rights they defend. They are hypersensitive about the words used to designate minorities and about anything that is said concerning minorities. The terms “negro”, “oriental”, “handicapped” or “chick” for an African, an Asian, a disabled person or a woman originally had no derogatory connotation. “Broad” and “chick” were merely the feminine equivalents of “guy”, “dude” or “fellow”. The negative connotations have been attached to these terms by the activists themselves. Some animal rights activists have gone so far as to reject the word “pet” and insist on its replacement by “animal companion”. Leftish anthropologists go to great lengths to avoid saying anything about primitive peoples that could conceivably be interpreted as negative. They want to replace the word “primitive” by “nonliterate”. They may seem almost paranoid about anything that might suggest that any primitive culture is inferior to ours. (We do not mean to imply that primitive cultures ARE inferior to ours. We merely point out the hyper sensitivity of leftish anthropologists.)

--- End quote ---

And it's pretty much bang on the money, whether you like the author or not. (There's a lot of good insight in that essay.)

The system puts forward an agenda telling you WHAT you SHOULD feel, and if you don't, YOU are WRONG.

But the entire framework is based on setting up a sick and twisted world view. That the people are gay or whatever is simply an irrelevant consideration. It perpetuates the "~ism/~ist/~phobic" nonsense that itself sets up. Remove all that claptrap from the equation, and you are only left with people. It is the activists and idiots (group members or group opposition) that are the real problems as they are the ones perpetuating the illusion that these "groupings" matter.

Here's an example of setting up an arbitrary distinction that groups people:

Coffee drinkers
Thrills gum chewers
Short haired men
Bearded men

To pretend that these are important distinctions is simply insane. The us/them then comes into play and everything goes to Hell.

Now, that isn't to say that it doesn't make sense for men with beards to talk amongst themselves about beard-stuff, like what trimmers are better to use, etc. But that's no different than software users talking in an online forum about software. ;)

For those that have never read the essay above, it's an excellent read. You can (and will) draw your own conclusions about it, but most likely will enjoy reading a lot of it if for no other reason than it presents a different viewpoint.

TaoPhoenix:
"If you don't approve of binary distinctions, then you are a terrorist!"

Stoic Joker:
+1 for Fred Nerd-Renegade (October 07, 2012, 07:20 AM)
--- End quote ---

Make that +2 - As your spoiler synopsis perfectly summarizes why I have such unbridled contempt for the PC movement ... It simply exacerbates a problem that didn't need to exist in the first place.

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