KittenAuth - the worlds cutest authorisation system
Spam is a massive problem on the internet today, with numerous outlets for any user to submit their opinions (comments, blogs etc), and these outlets have been plagued by spam. In order to stop the spam, companies devised ways to ensure that the user is indeed a human and not a spambot (often taking the form of a random set of characters inset into an image which the user must decipher). These are often hard to read and certainly not suitable for those with disabilities. Furthermore, optical character recognition technology is improving and breaking these authorisation methods, so the author (owner of thePCSpy.com) has devised an entirely new authorisation method.
The specifics of the design are handled on the website (link at the bottom of this article) with the end result being a 3*3 grid of images where the user must click 3 images that contain kittens. These images are randomly selected from a database of Kittens | Non-Kittens. Although not entirely uncrackable initially the design concept was very, very strong indeed with interest shown from around the globe.
The expansion for this authorisation system is immense - as the system does not necessarily have to use Kittens, it could be populated from a database consisting of Dogs | Cars | Bikes | Trees | Chairs | Guns | etc - with the user having to select 3 of a randomly selected topic. Oli (the author) is currently developing a PHP edition of the system which could suddenly be appearing everywhere you look.
KittenAuth has been picked up by various reporting houses:
- featured on the front page of Digg
- featured on Reddit
- featured on TheRegister
- numerous blogsites around the intermeweb
The future certainly looks bright for KittenAuth and with any luck it will be picked up by the larger companies and replace the difficult random character systems. Links to the project:
KittenAuth Article on ThePCSpy
KittenAuth Test-Page
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