Hacking Captcha with non-artificial intelligence

Nowadays I am looking through twitter api (twitter4j) and trying to learn twitter services as I want to find out how many times status containing the words ‘steve jobs died’ or ‘want buy mazda 3’ tweeted. As you just noticed using tweets as a source of information, it is possible to find out which car is popular nowadays… examples can be extended to far different points …

however as the company i am working is restricting access to twitter, I couldn’t use twitter api. But hold on! I can also do that by using google searches. if you type site:twitter.com inurl:”/status” steve jobs died in the google search box you will get lots of tweets apprising death of steve jobs to people. What’s more is if you have a programming background you can get search result in your program to analyse. By doing that, for instance, you may find out peoples’ impression; if they are happy or unhappy… I know it was a silly example but you can deal with it 🙂

At this point another problem emerges. After a few sequence of requests, google gets suspicious if you are a robot and asks you a captch question. for those who doesn’t know captcha may just skip reading this post 😛 or check wiki.

Ok now we know that captcha is a common problem for robots trying to hack web sites or collecting data but how to deal with it? up to now many methods has emerged mostly using artificial intelligence (specifically anns) but I have another idea (well I have no idea if people has already tought or are presently using), solving this problem not with ai but with non-artificial intelligences called human beings (well I am not much religious as u just spot) 🙂 . why don’t we ask captchas to other people and give rewards to those answering correctly? Assume we have an online game and if a user answers a captch correctly, give him/her additional chips/resources or whatever.

Here is the diagram of the entities represented with capical letter prefixes and actions represented with number prefixes.

At the first step our robot sends a search request to google, google either sends the result or asks for a captcha. if it is a captcha our robot sends the request to our web site and asks to real users. if any of the users answer, our site sends the request to the robot back and redirects it to the google with the answer. if the answer is true, system gives a present to the user.

that’s all for now. if you have any questions or ideas please don’t hesitate to give me a feedback.

I hope you didn’t find it stupid and enjoyed 🙂