Asirra is a web service developed by a Microsoft Research team to replace Captcha as an HIP. (If you don’t know what Captcha is, click here). Asirra uses pictures of cats and dogs to distinguish between an automated bot and a human. The visitor should distinguish between the cats and dogs correctly to continue in the sign-up page (or wherever you use Asirra). Currently Asirra is given as a web service and anyone can implement it in their websites by pasting some code provided by Microsoft.
The research team claims that Asirra is secure because they use a “large” database of cats and dogs. The pictures are obtained from the Petfinder website. They also claim that the database contains more than 3 million pictures. Now how useful is the product? Can it really be used instead of Captcha? Continue Reading »
