Articles

Understanding CAPTCHA-Solving Services in an Economic Context 5: Do CAPTCHAs Actually Work?

Delving into human solver backends and moving on to the summary, Marti Motoyama provides retrieved statistics and draws general conclusions on the subject. Now we’re going to take a look at the human solver backends to get a sense of the worker experiences. We signed up as a solver on two sites, knowing...

Understanding CAPTCHA-Solving Services in an Economic Context 4: Labor Demographics

Outlined here are a number of experiments conducted by Marti Motoyama and his colleagues in order to figure out the demographic patterns for CAPTCHA solvers. By looking at the labor demographics, we can better understand the cogs that operate within these CAPTCHA-solving machines; perhaps new CAPTCHAs can...

Understanding CAPTCHA-Solving Services in an Economic Context 3: Evaluation of the Human-Based Services

Having singled out the key metrics, Marti Motoyama now proceeds with an evaluation of the 8 major human-based CAPTCHA-solving services by these criteria. We just went ahead and signed up as a customer on each of those 8 human solver services, and then we submitted a CAPTCHA every 5 minutes over the course...

Understanding CAPTCHA-Solving Services in an Economic Context 2: Software and Human-Based CAPTCHA Solvers

Marti Motoyama now focuses on the detailed comparison and features of automated CAPTCHA-solving solutions out there and third-party human-based solvers. Software CAPTCHA Solvers Let’s delve down further into the challenges facing software solvers. First of all, they require skilled programming labor, and...

Understanding CAPTCHA-Solving Services in an Economic Context, by Marti Motoyama

Participating in the USENIX Security Symposium, software engineer and security researcher Marti Motoyama presents an in-depth study of automated and human-based CAPTCHA-solving services on the market. Good afternoon, Ladies and Gentlemen. My name is Marti Motoyama. The title of my talk is Understanding...

Cybernetics for the Masses 6: Questions and Answers

At the end of her talk at 27C3 event, Lepht Anonym answers questions from the conference attendees about nuances of using sensory subdermal devices. Anyway, that’s about everything, so ask me questions. Conference Host: So, after all of these very well advised warnings about doing this, raise your hand if...

Cybernetics for the Masses 5: The Southpaw Project

This fragment of Lepth Anonym’s talk is entirely dedicated to her Southpaw initiative as a subdermal counterpart of the Sensebridge’s Northpaw project. The Sensebridge hackerspace – they’re a couple of colleagues of mine – have the Northpaw, which is a haptic compass I’ve talked about earlier....

Cybernetics for the Masses 4: Experimenting with Neodymium Implants

In this part Lepht Anonym gets into detail about neodymium implants, including the use of Sugru for bioproofing, and the results of her own experiments. Successfully installed implants just function like any other sense you’ve got. They’re just there in the background. They’re not intrusive; they just...

Cybernetics for the Masses 3: Using Thermistors and Neodymium Implants

Lepht Anonym now shares her experience with thermistor devices to determine the level of body heat, and dwells on a cheap way of going about neodymium implants. I’m on a lot of medications, as you can probably tell, so one of the side effects is occasionally my sense of temperature just blips in and out...

Cybernetics for the Masses 2: Nerve Stimulation and RFID Tagging

The main emphasis Lepht Anonym makes in this part of her presentation is on implants for nerve stimulation and experiments with RFID identification. This is my main principle: nerve stimulation (see image). Anything can stimulate nerves, as I said. This has been known to medical science for a very long...