Posted on Saturday 15th of September 2007 at 13:55 in The Internet

Microsoft stole KittenAuth, renamed it and claimed it as their own.

You may have heard about Microsoft's Asirra project (visit it here) which aims to solve the problem with CAPTCHAs by using kittens. This made big news once again recently on Yahoo news (URL no longer active) and while it's a good idea, people shouldn't forget where the original concept came from.

In April 2006 my good friend Oli from ThePCSpy.com blogged about his latest experiment "The Cutest Human-Test: KittenAuth". I remember this period, because I helped him rationalise the ideas and test the concept model; so I'm more than familiar with the initial development of Kittenauth.



What is KittenAuth? What is a Captcha?
Captcha's are "Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart" (Wikipedia). KittenAuth was Oli's solution to the normal captchas you find around the Internet (example seen below). The logic was that rather than entering the jumbled contents of a dynamic image, you click 3 kittens in a randomly generated grid of animals.



The popularity of KittenAuth
KittenAuth was submitted to Digg in April and received 1235 Diggs. He then blogged about KittenAuth going prime time; documenting the PR the project has received. This included an interview with The Inquirer and an article on The Register.

Microsoft took this project to the next step
The Microsoft Asirra project sites Oli as a source yet the Yahoo news story did not. I can only imagine that the more and more the Asirra project is pushed into the public domain, the less Oli will be cited as having the original idea. This isn't actually fair and I'd be very very upset if I was him. The idea is excellent yet the credit certainly won't be passed in his direction anymore. Any financial gain from the project won't pay royalties to him either and it's not like he could patent the idea originally.



I'm really interested in seeing what Microsoft do with Oli's idea because if there's any financial gain involved... Well the whole situation gets a lot more bitter. Fair enough, Microsoft have linked to him on their project page but the Yahoo News story epitomised the problem. The title of the news story was "An executive at Microsoft has an unusual idea" and that just isn't true at all. The press surrounding the project are now handing the credit to Microsoft for being visionary and thinking outside of the box - whereas the truth was that it was a Computer Science student in April 2006, lying on his bed pondering why Captchas suck so much.

It's not Microsoft's fault really, but maybe they should volunteer the information more willingly because it wasn't their idea. The improvements they're suggesting aren't even their idea, Oli blogged about them in improving KittenAuth towards the end of April '06. I remember because I was sat on messenger helping out with the maths (trying to reduce the 1/84 chance of a bot "lucking out" and bashing it's way through). So please, if you see something discussing using Kittens/Pandas/Puppies/etc as a means of being more creative regarding Captchas - remember credit should rest upon the shoulders of the original inventor, rather than the software firm who simply have more time to copy the idea and run with it.

 

Enjoy this article? Why not subscribe to the full RSS feed?