0810: "Constructive"

[black_hat_guy]

Title-Text: And what about all the people who won't be able to join the community because they're terrible at making helpful and constructive co-- ...oh.
F1RST P0ST!

Well, this is ironic.

I apologize: I really suck at copying down text really really fast in order to make my witty joke. Maybe I should have copied and pasted from the html...

[joee]

I approve of this idea. Bonus points if they have to prove they can type/spell correctly

p.s. HI GLASNT

Edit: You screwed up the title text: "And what about all the people who won't be able to join the community because they're terrible at making helpful and constructive co-- ... oh."

[akrolsmir]

I really like the idea of tapping into the power of spammers and using it for good. Two (or is it three?) birds with one stone!

[Me321]

Get out of my head:

The browser game Ikariam was hit by spammers this weekend, they made people think their accounts were hacked, and caused some to panic.

[Paladin65536]

Mouseover text - "And what about all the people who won't be able to join the community because they're terrible at making helpful and constructive co-- ... oh."

Heh, interesting idea. Doubt we'll be able to make AIs that good for a while yet, though. ^^

EDIT - Dangit, ninja'd! >.<

[glasnt]

HI JOEE



Sample spam:

"Hi user1235, you might what to have a look at what company xyz are doing with relation to product abc to make it such and such.

While you're at it, you might want to buy some v1agra here: http://spamosaur.blah"

[Eternal Density]

I find this xkcd constructive.
[edit] The 'do not reply to spam posts' rule will be difficult to apply in this thread...

[lutzj]

HI JOEE



Sample spam:

"Hi user1235, you might what to have a look at what company xyz are doing with relation to product abc to make it such and such.

While you're at it, you might want to buy some v1agra here: http://spamosaur.blah"

Ad-supported analysis... I like it.

[ysth]

Venusians make horrible lovers. The wriggling hair and the tail are just too distracting.

[murgatroid99]

I really liked this comic, and I wanted to say that ReCAPTCHA actually does something very similar: ReCAPTCHA is the one with 2 words instead of a bunch of random letters. What they do is take two words from a book they are digitizing: one the computer can read and one it cannot, and they don't say which is which. They test whether the human got the readable one right, and if a bunch of people get the same answer for the other one they assume it is the right answer. That's why you sometimes get weird untypeable characters; the computer doesn't know what it says. That way people, including spammers, who answer CAPTCHAs are doing something useful.

[thoreaulylazy]

Unfortunately, all the spammers have to do is outnumber the humans and upvote themselves. And many spammers possess millions of IP addresses, thereby guaranteeing themselves positive votes. Any vote-based system is susceptible to this sort of manipulation.

[skeptical scientist]

But what about all the people who won't be able to join the community because they're terrible at making helpful and constructive comments?

[Have_A_SnApple]

Perhaps something like this was HAL's second lesson, after learning Daisy Bell.
Heuristics and algorithms are involved.

[Radical Pi]

Hey gyse i dont no if dis is a gud idea cuz i hav gr8 ideas all da time but peeps dont find mi constructive

Not only that, but it also gets rid of people without the patience to wait for a second user to confirm that they are real.

Oh wait, time for a funny outcome of this situation. To catch the checks if a user is posting constructive comments, more spambots are created to confirm that other spambots are being constructive, with more spambots to confirm those spambots, creating a Ponzi scheme-like tower of spambots on every website until the entire blogosphere implodes under the DDoS of CAPTCHAs

[black_hat_guy]

Re: 0810: Constructive
by skeptical scientist » Sun Oct 24, 2010 8:20 pm UTC

But what about all the people who won't be able to join the community because they're terrible at making helpful and constructive comments?

At first I thought you were correcting me again. XD

[badmartialarts]

Hey gyse i dont no if dis is a gud idea cuz i hav gr8 ideas all da time but peeps dont find mi constructive

Not only that, but it also gets rid of people without the patience to wait for a second user to confirm that they are real.

Oh wait, time for a funny outcome of this situation. To catch the checks if a user is posting constructive comments, more spambots are created to confirm that other spambots are being constructive, with more spambots to confirm those spambots, creating a Ponzi scheme-like tower of spambots on every website until the entire blogosphere implodes under the DDoS of CAPTCHAs

An interesting way to win the Turing Test, at least. The people who can't tell you are a machine ARE ALSO MACHINES....

[pagaen]

My favorite XKCD of recent memory. The first one to make me literally lol in a while, too.

[DreadArchon]

Good comic! There have been a lot of meh comics lately IMHO, but this one definitely made me " "

[Have_A_SnApple]

Oh wait, time for a funny outcome of this situation. To catch the checks if a user is posting constructive comments, more spambots are created to confirm that other spambots are being constructive, with more spambots to confirm those spambots, creating a Ponzi scheme-like tower of spambots on every website until the entire blogosphere implodes under the DDoS of CAPTCHAs

Perhaps this will result in the creation of an emergent intelligence, a kind of hive-mind. Hopefully it will mutate and evolve into a more benign and intelligent form.

[elite4koga]

agreed, this one made me lol irl

[LSN]

Starting to feel like classic XKCD (from what I gather since I wasn't here until relatively recently). I like it.

[jakelin]

I am supportive of this

[Steve the Pocket]

I really liked this comic, and I wanted to say that ReCAPTCHA actually does something very similar: ReCAPTCHA is the one with 2 words instead of a bunch of random letters. What they do is take two words from a book they are digitizing: one the computer can read and one it cannot, and they don't say which is which. They test whether the human got the readable one right, and if a bunch of people get the same answer for the other one they assume it is the right answer. That's why you sometimes get weird untypeable characters; the computer doesn't know what it says. That way people, including spammers, who answer CAPTCHAs are doing something useful.

So, if one of the words can be read by computers and they don't check what the other one is, doesn't that make it completely useless for what captchas were designed to do?

[rpgamer]

I really liked this comic, and I wanted to say that ReCAPTCHA actually does something very similar: ReCAPTCHA is the one with 2 words instead of a bunch of random letters. What they do is take two words from a book they are digitizing: one the computer can read and one it cannot, and they don't say which is which. They test whether the human got the readable one right, and if a bunch of people get the same answer for the other one they assume it is the right answer. That's why you sometimes get weird untypeable characters; the computer doesn't know what it says. That way people, including spammers, who answer CAPTCHAs are doing something useful.

Is this the result of such a system?

[CorruptUser]

Oh wait, time for a funny outcome of this situation. To catch the checks if a user is posting constructive comments, more spambots are created to confirm that other spambots are being constructive, with more spambots to confirm those spambots, creating a Ponzi scheme-like tower of spambots on every website until the entire blogosphere implodes under the DDoS of CAPTCHAs

Perhaps this will result in the creation of an emergent intelligence, a kind of hive-mind. Hopefully it will mutate and evolve into a more benign and intelligent form.

Oh dear god! That's how the robots will takeover. Sentient spambots.

In the future, man will be required by law to enlarge his penis and use vicodin, and on occasion, donate $5000 to a Nigerian.

[Relsqui]

Starting to feel like classic XKCD (from what I gather since I wasn't here until relatively recently). I like it.

All the old ones are still online, you know. You can form your opinion about whether the old ones are better or whether this is like them.

[bytbox]

I really liked this comic, and I wanted to say that ReCAPTCHA actually does something very similar: ReCAPTCHA is the one with 2 words instead of a bunch of random letters. What they do is take two words from a book they are digitizing: one the computer can read and one it cannot, and they don't say which is which. They test whether the human got the readable one right, and if a bunch of people get the same answer for the other one they assume it is the right answer. That's why you sometimes get weird untypeable characters; the computer doesn't know what it says. That way people, including spammers, who answer CAPTCHAs are doing something useful.

So, if one of the words can be read by computers and they don't check what the other one is, doesn't that make it completely useless for what captchas were designed to do?

In reality, the former is hard enough. We have algorithms that can break most CAPTCHAs out there - but at the point where you're spending several seconds per CAPTCHA to run an expensive algorithm (and only get it right 50% of the time), it doesn't become particularly profitable anymore. Much better to hunt for those that don't require a CAPTCHA.

Also, I think most (or all) implementations require your guess on the second CAPTCHA (the "unsolvable" one) to be at least /similar/ to some standard the computer has created from its own algorithm and previous guesses.

Awesome comic.

[meat.paste]

In addition to the drugs, penis enlargement, and occasional Nigerian prince, you must also go buy a fake watch. Perhaps it fits around the penis you've enlarged with drugs and the occasional Nigerian prince.

Funny comic and a brilliant idea.

[HonoreDB]

Unfortunately, all the spammers have to do is outnumber the humans and upvote themselves. And many spammers possess millions of IP addresses, thereby guaranteeing themselves positive votes. Any vote-based system is susceptible to this sort of manipulation.

I think the design actually prevents that, due to a bootstrapping problem. How do the first spammy comments get in?

[RockoTDF]

Am I the only one that read this and thought "He is attacking the people on the fora who criticize his recent work constantly!" ?

[DavidRoss]

I really liked this comic, and I wanted to say that ReCAPTCHA actually does something very similar: ReCAPTCHA is the one with 2 words instead of a bunch of random letters. What they do is take two words from a book they are digitizing: one the computer can read and one it cannot, and they don't say which is which. They test whether the human got the readable one right, and if a bunch of people get the same answer for the other one they assume it is the right answer. That's why you sometimes get weird untypeable characters; the computer doesn't know what it says. That way people, including spammers, who answer CAPTCHAs are doing something useful.

Well, yes, when I type in a ReCAPTCHA I am helping digitize a book and that is useful. But TANSTAAFL. Just because the work is distributed in small unnoticeable chunks doesn't mean it is efficient or free work is obtained.

The ReCAPTCHA subjects are doing extra work, albeit a small amount of work. We're typing in two words, one of which is totally unnecessary for bot detection, because the bot detector has only one word (the one it knows) to work with to tell if you are human or a bot. Taking the unit of one "WHOO" (Word-Human OCR Operation, for lack of better term), each ReCAPTCHA test requires one WHOO more than the work of just one bot detection.

To complete the digitization of a text, say a classic manuscript or whatever, you run an automated scan and some computer determines that some words are not confidently OCR'ed. Let's say there are 200 words that go onto the list for human intervention. You'll need at least 200 WHOOs, but more likely some "confidence multiplier" on that, to ensure the text is correctly OCR'ed.

From what I understand how ReCAPTCHA works, they have a high confidence multiplier, i.e., they give one word to many different people and only accept the result when sufficient consensus exists over many, many people. If the words go to people (paid or volunteer) who are intentional human OCRs, let's say you reach confidence after five people WHOO each word (i.e., their confidence multiplier is 5 and the manuscript gets digitized for 1,000 WHOOs of effort). When using ReCAPTCHA subjects, you'll need a lot more people looking at the same word to get the same confidence, because ReCAPTCHA adds noise (which also makes each individual WHOO a little harder) and because ReCAPTCHA subjects are not as careful as intentional human OCRs (or they are lazy and know that there is a 50% chance they make it past the bot detector by always typing "x" for the second word). So, that is several thousand WHOOs to get that same manuscript digitized. Thus, ReCAPTCHA approach is less efficient, but somehow it is OK because it is thinly spread and somewhat unnoticeable to many people.

With that logic, we should allow airlines to save on the tedious work they do disposing of airplane sewage, so long as they disperse it at 35,000 feet in small enough drops that nobody would notice.

That said, I don't mind helping out the ReCAPTCHA folks now and then and doing a little extra free work.

[phlip]

So, if one of the words can be read by computers and they don't check what the other one is, doesn't that make it completely useless for what captchas were designed to do?

In theory, I don't know if reCaptcha actually does this, but it would make sense... once a particular unreadable word has been used many times, and lots of people have given the same answer for it, so it's able to treat it as "known", and can use it to fill in the original OCR that it was trying to do (which is the whole point of reCaptcha) then it can theoretically start using that word as the "known" half... so people start being given a pair of words, both of which are unreadable to the best AI out there. But, for one of which, the correct answer has been crowdsourced and can be compared with the answer you give. And, meanwhile, you're giving an answer for the other half, expanding the options reCaptcha has for creating captchas.

And so, in reply to the ninja, each time you fill out a reCaptcha field, you're not just slightly assisting the OCR that they're trying to do, but you're also (potentially, if reCaptcha actually works this way) slightly increasing the security of all the sites that use reCaptcha, by working towards increasing the pool of unreadable-to-computers words they can use for the actual "security" half of the test.

[Mr. Burke]

But what about all the people who won't be able to join the community because they're terrible at making helpful and constructive comments?

They are subhuman and should not be allowed to communicate with people like Randall. Easy.

Unfortunately, all the spammers have to do is outnumber the humans and upvote themselves. And many spammers possess millions of IP addresses, thereby guaranteeing themselves positive votes. Any vote-based system is susceptible to this sort of manipulation.

I think the design actually prevents that, due to a bootstrapping problem. How do the first spammy comments get in?

The same way the first non-spammy comments get in?

[xhable]

Obvious flaw #1.
* Spam-bots approve spam-bots.
Obvious flaw #2
* Human (a) argues with human (b). human (a) declines genuine constructive comments of human (b) because they disagree with them/ out of spite.

[Qaanol]

I smiled at the punchline. Then I sighed contentedly at the title text. Then I thought, just supposing the mission does accomplished, then just because the bots are capable of making automated constructive and helpful comments, doesn’t mean they’ll be used for that once they pass the entrance exam.

[Mazuku]

Korea has a system in place in website with a lot of traffic that makes anyone who puts down a comment to confirm their identity with an ID number which they get from the Korea Communications Commission before the comment is allowed to be posted.

I am sure there are a number of issues that would be needed to be dealt with before western countries could adopt anything similar but that would certainly render spam bots obsolete.

[ijuin]

Such as, perhaps, the issue that under such a system those who control it invariably declare impermissible any content that would inconvenience said controlling people (e.g. criticism or whistle-blowing regarding misconduct of the people in power).

To quote Brother Lal, leader of the Peacekeeper faction in "Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri":

"Beware he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master."

[Vaskafdt]

While the system shown in the comic is not at all practical, the quality of the comic is great. superbly delivered punchline, followed by an even funnier title text.

Can't wait to see what the xkcdsw guys will do with it.

[phillipsjk]

Unfortunately, all the spammers have to do is outnumber the humans and upvote themselves. And many spammers possess millions of IP addresses, thereby guaranteeing themselves positive votes. Any vote-based system is susceptible to this sort of manipulation.

ReCaptch is vulnerable to this as well. If the Spambots get the "unkown" word consistently wrong, but by some fluke are able to get the "known" word correct, the spambots can quickly upvote the computerized version of the spelling, poisoning the word list.

I lost all of my respect for ReCaptcha when they started severely distorting the words above and beyond smudges on the original. They now allow typing errors to compensate for the human error rate (and untypeable characters, I suppose).

[PokerJoker811]

After reading this thread, I have determined that the best course of action to survive the robot takeover is to move to Nigeria.