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Wednesday, August 26, 2009

Tech I Am Human, For I Have Read Your Advertisement

Posted by Anthony Hecht on Wed, Aug 26, 2009 at 11:49 AM

Microsoft knows a little something about captive audiences. Witness, for example, this patent application for a CAPTCHA system where you prove you're a human by recognizing some awesome products.

Microsoft says that this innovation creates "an effective way for advertisers to deliver their message to a captive audience. Unlike so much web-based advertising that accompanies popular web portals such as search and news sites that users can easily ignore, here the user must actively engage in reading and understanding the content in the advertisement in the HIP (human interactive proof) challenge in order to identify the solution to the challenge."

I look forward to the widespread adoption of this technique. I am a human, after all, and I can recognize any product you got. Hell, I'll probably buy one!

Via TechFlash.

Comments (12) RSS

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Maybe they can do a tie-in with my doctor's eye charts!

E
XBOX
WENDYS

Stupid whitespace deletion... :(

Posted by Cracker Jack on August 26, 2009 at 11:55 AM

Probably a better metric for intelligence in a consumer society than WASL.

Posted by Alfred Binet on August 26, 2009 at 11:59 AM

I look forward to throwing things at the people who created this, who think we are consumer monkeys in their cage.

Posted by Will in Seattle

on August 26, 2009 at 12:00 PM

and we thought ticketmaster couldn't get more fucking annoying. you know they are gonna be all over this "technology.

Posted by spoiler alert on August 26, 2009 at 12:04 PM

a patent? for this? wow.

Posted by Beetlecat on August 26, 2009 at 12:04 PM

This is a trick question. Is the answer XBOX or XBOX 360?

And this won't stop the spammers. Text recognition software can be trained to read logos, and it would be against the Microsoft corporate brand to sufficiently distort their logos to thwart spammers. So, I don't forsee this as a actual viable alternative to the normal CAPTCHA images you see now.

Posted by arts&letters on August 26, 2009 at 12:04 PM

Recaptcha is still cooler, because digitizing old books is cooler than advertizing Microsoft's shitty products.

Posted by Proteus on August 26, 2009 at 12:05 PM

Ditto, proteus. #7 FTW

Posted by meeps on August 26, 2009 at 12:11 PM

@6 I don't think the intent is to actually be better than current captcha systems, I think the point is to convince advertisers and website operators it is for the purposes of generating revenue.

Posted by pragmatic on August 26, 2009 at 12:22 PM

The requirement for use of a web form is that you are human, not that you have read an advertisement then passed a comprehension test.

Requiring a confirmed ad impression just to complete a purchase is a greedy, double-dipping abuse. I will boycott any retailer that adopts this -- even you Amazon, my love.

Now if that ad revenue was passed on to the consumer, as an option to earn savings, "Save $.xx by correctly stating what brand of detergent you see above." That would be a fair implementation of this patent.

Posted by Iam Jussayin on August 26, 2009 at 5:07 PM

omg why can't those people who make stuff stop trying to sell it to me

Posted by cubby on August 26, 2009 at 5:11 PM

Seems like this would be a lot easier to get around. You are working with a smaller dictionary of words and in the example the words are not smudged at all. The problem becomes find as much text as you can in the image, then find the closest matching product name to a word in the text. (Since we are not skilled enough to read image text exactly.)

Posted by allie ballie on August 27, 2009 at 4:49 AM