KittenAuth

[pne]

You've probably heard of CAPTCHAs (the most famous form being the distorted text presented as an image, where you have to enter the word into a form field); KittenAuth is similar but different.

It shows you nine pictures, three of which are kittens. You have to click the three pictures of kittens in order to pass.

It has some weaknesses (e.g. being inaccessible to blind people -- or even sighted people with low vision or in bad lighting, since the resolution is [presumably deliberately] low and pixellated; if you only have a fixed store of pictures, at some point a robot will have seen them all), but seems an interesting idea.

Comments

[ilia-yasny.livejournal.com]

I think distorted text is as well inaccessible to blind people and those with low vision..

I've heard about an idea of clicking several pictures (you've already chosen before) out of many instead of typing the password.
But this approach is also vulnerable - the sniffer can spy the pictures you click.
Now they're trying to develop a slightly different approach - you choose three pictures, and when you want to log in you are presented a bunch of them, you make an imaginary triangle from these three pictures and click anywhere inside it.

Now some fun (sorry, it's in Russian, but self-comprehensible):
http://ziza.ru/2005/03/08/zaszita-ot-avtomaticheskoi-registracii.html

[lydiabutterfly.livejournal.com]

they so call it CATCHA

[lydiabutterfly.livejournal.com]

they SHOULD call it CATCHA. i wrote the wrong word.

CATCHA

[pne.livejournal.com]

Haha! Good idea; I like it!

(I don't like the Swiss keyboard here, though—it's very similar to the German keyboard I'm familiar with, but subtly different in the placement of a couple of punctuation marks, including ' and !.)

[opal1159.livejournal.com]

Last I checked, Neopets has a captcha for buying from the official shops. There's a picture with several pets and you have to click the right one. You have to be quick so that what you're trying to buy doesn't get bought by someone else first, so it's too bad if you don't know the common pet species, but I guess they had to implement it for auto-buying bots or something.

[pthalo]

actually, there's only one neopet in the image, you just have to click it. so it says "click on the kacheek to continue" and you click on the only neopet in the image. here's one I just got

http://www.neopets.com/captcha_show.phtml?_x_pwned=eae4dc828fc52e2eac3261a53a86ad9f

[opal1159.livejournal.com]

oh O.o I thought I had seen multiple-pet images before since I think I remember accidentally clicking on the wrong pet before. It's been a while since I've been in the shops though.

[pthalo]

hmm, it's been like this for as long as i can remember (well, i remember when they didn't have this feature), but then, I don't use the shops all that much.

[denial-land.livejournal.com]

but I want ponies!

[ladyortyger.livejournal.com]

LOL!~ "OMG PONIES!!! YOU CLICKED 3 KITTENS!!!!!!"