Like waiting in a lengthy and invasive TSA line to board a flight, the actions of a few malicious people can mean an eternal burden on everyone else. Similarly ever since the rise of spam bots, your favorite apps and forums have been increasingly irritating to use.
They’re already today. Sometimes the CAPTCHA is impossible to decipher, other times it’s just flat out wrong. You not only have to answer the question right but also have an understanding of Captcha’s quirks to pass. For example, I once failed a captcha to mark all the squares containing a bus when in fact there was only a truck on-screen and continued without selecting. Still others insist that “clicking captchas are mostly about tracking mouse movement and response time, it usually doesn’t matter what you click.”
But now the rat race between man and machine has come so close that it’s now having a significant impact on user experience.
Jokes aside, as artificial general intelligence becomes closer to reality, it’s clear that we will need an alternative. Below, we provide 3 solutions to handle spam without CAPTCHAs starting with the least to most creative.
Bio-Metrics
One option is bio-metric scanning. However the drawback is obviously over privacy and security concerns. hackers might end up with the data, or even the very creators of the system—which can be just as bad. Though there is a way of provably verifying information against a list of confirmed identities, without exposing who was requested it. Zero knowledge proofs, and trusted execution environments are relatively new ways of solving this problem. No trusted third parties are required if these trust-less systems are applied.
Micro Payments
Another option is to simply have a paid version of the software to prevent spammers. It can also be done anonymously now with cryptocurrencies. An email version of this idea has been thought up before. Called boxbe. It’s an email service where advertisers can bid for access to your inbox. You set the terms by setting a minimum payment for the email to get through. Over time, your balance fills up with dozens of micro payments from advertisers vying for your attention.
Coil is another project that aims to monetize web content directly without ads. You pre-load a balance of money which is then distributed to content creators based on time spent viewing the content and how much you engage with it. This sort of plug-in browser system automatically solves for the spam problem, because it’s tied to an existing account.
Proof of work
Is there a third option possible if those aforementioned are undesirable? What if users could opt to contribute CPU cycles or even disk space with proof of capacity instead? It begs the question: Computers alone gaining access, isn’t this exactly what we’re trying to avoid here? I would argue that’s not actually what CAPTCHA and other bot prevention schemes really do, since anyone with enough resources can simply hire programmers to circumvent them, or, pay people to complete them. What really matters is that spammers have to incur a significant cost to do their deeds at scale relative to real customers. It’s a insignificant to the user, but a huge cost to the spammer who would need to do it en-masse. Like most crimes, it’s impossible to eliminate completely, but adding friction helps to reduce it. The proof of Work can be allocated to useful causes such as folding at home or mining that goes towards paying for new features on the platform. This way the malicious actors efforts are redirected towards something positive.
Leave a Reply