Using a central license server can be used to license the number of concurrent users. I've installed software on thousands of computers as part of a base image that only had 25 concurrent licenses paid for. The usage pattern meant that we rarely exceeded the number of concurrent license, but the software was widely used enough that it made sense to deploy everywhere. In the end we also asked for the limitation to be removed because of several issues (eg; the check out process for off-network usage was cumbersome and locked up licenses for too long, the license server wasn't great at releasing license and we'd frequently have to manual release them). After monitoring our usage over a period of time the software company agreed that removing the license server was the best option to address the issues. I have no knowledge of this case, but this is one scenario where the number of licenses would be so much lower than the number of installs.
Agreed. I was responding to hashkb as to why they might think they could install it widely without having more than 38 licenses. It also seems like a valid reason to ask for the phone-home mechanism to be removed without malicious intent to subvert licensing restrictions.
- I haven't seen one media story about this yet, outside of social media.
I also live in michigan and both of the major detroit newspapers had this on the front page early this morning [0][1].
- Tesla isn't a name brand here like Ford or GM. In fact, if you asked a lot of people if we should help the Big Three with this sort of legislation, you might be surprised by the answer. Remember, they generate a LOT of jobs in this state: not just the Big Three, but the tier 2 and tier 3 manufactors. While I think logic would win out in the day, I wouldn't assume that everybody in Michigan _wants_ Tesla. It isn't in their best interest.
This is about helping dealerships, not manufacturers so you'd think that any support for the Big Three manufactures wouldn't correlate with support for this bill.
in context we get about 40%-60% higher conversion rate depending on the use case and have over a 95% success rate. we have a lightbox mode that makes it really apparent what you are doing and only has you attempt a captcha after you submit and the form is validated.
We launched in January and are using games to make them easier for people. Some of our early testing showed captchas can decrease signups by up to 25% and we're able to recover almost all of that.
We also monitor how you play the game (like mouse movement) so we can ramp up our security without having to make the task more difficult for people. Read more here http://areyouahuman.com/how-playthru-stops-the-bots
I'm skeptical of your efforts to distinguish humans from bots by mouse movements and other inputs. Anything you can infer can be modeled. It's unreasonable to expect a smart captcha cracker to resemble a zero reaction time Counter Strike aimbot.
Thanks for asking. First, our main focus is on making something more usable for people. We also think captchas are only part of the solution and should be employed with other things (rate limiting, keyword filtering, etc)
That being said, we don't just ignore security. There are a lot of captcha alternatives out there that survive on just obscurity, if they were widely adopted, they wouldn't take much to get around (like a slide to unlock captcha). We analyze mouse movement and other behavior, to avoid this.
To test our algorithms, we write our own bots to break our game (as well as working with the AI lab at the university of michigan) and use that data in our machine learning algorithms. We're always tweaking the bot to see how we can beat it and then looking for new features from the data that we can use.
The main point being, that as people do write bots, we can learn from that and incorporate it. We can also adjust the threshold. Some of our customers care much more about usability and just want a minimum level of protection, other's want the threshold a little higher and accept the risk that humans might fail more often.
> our main focus is on making something more usable for people
Considering that your games can be played by a random number generator with something like 10% success rate, you can just skip the captcha completely. Much more user friendly.
The other things you look at to increase security, like detecting patterns and behaviors that indicates bots can be done without a captcha.
I'm note sure you can get a 10% success rate, if you have let us know, we'd love to hear about it. Note that our demo page has the threshold set to almost nothing and other security features disabled.
Totally agree that we could detect patterns and behaviors without the captcha. Baby steps, though. We'll get there.
And it still identified my as a bot in one out of three tries. And now I shall put the food in the refrigerator when the only items left are a microphone, a stapler and a bottle of household cleaner.
This is so stupid. Your CAPTCHA is unusable by blind people, and your audio CAPTCHA is inaccessible (you have to see the <canvas> element to know where to click to access to the audio CAPTCHA).
Actually, we should be worked be ADA compliant and have worked to make this accessible.
Screen readers should pick up the alternate text.
<a href="javascript:AYAH_fallback()" style="position:absolute;left:-10000px;top:auto;width:1px;height:1px;overflow:hidden;">Please complete this audio captcha before submitting the form</a>
Also, I know the audio sucks, but it's the most secure out there, otherwise it would just be a giant hole for bots to get through. It's one of the things we want to make better.
In fact, we've experimented with audio games and had some good results.
If you want to download or listen the audio CAPTCHA, you have to click on a <canvas/> element, which is totally unusable by a blind people. It's like saying “Look, we've made an elevator, but you have to climb some stairs to take it”.
Ha. Looks like the domain is available. In reality we were initially targeting users in the US, but have had a lot of interest internationally. Most just use it as is, but we have had others pay for translation or custom games.
We are also planning on a set culturally agnostic (as well as culturally specific) games. If you go to our homepage and refresh through the games you'll see a shape game, that has no language for an example.
This is a neat idea, but these game captchas have some high level of similarity with in-banner-games (at least to me). Not sure if theses "catch the monkey" banners are still around but they were extremely annoying. I hope you are doing some testing to make absolutely sure that this great idea is not mistakenly experienced as some form of banner ad.
Thanks. We certainly don't want to become the equivalent of 'catch the monkey' We constantly do UX testing. Early on it was an issue that people thought we were just and ad on the page, but we updated our start screen and design. By default, we also show our games in a modal window after people click submit, so they know they have to do it. With these two things we saw registrations increase by 40% over recaptcha.
We're also getting ready to roll out an update to our API that will allow you to hide/disable the submit button until the game is played. Our testing showed this helped increase submission rates even more.
Finally, we are also trying different styles of games to see what people respond to best.
Damn, people were kind of hard on you. I think it's very clever. Even though sometimes our inventions don't work as perfectly as we expected them to. Your captcha system is new and fresh and many bots are not prepared for it. I'm sure you'll improve over time, the bots will improve over time, you'll counter, so on and so forth.
I'd rather have my signup system use areyouhuman than re-captcha. What makes me uneasy about using it on a massive site is the whole html5 + flash dependency. And the audio captcha alternative you have is terrible. I have better than average hearing and wasn't able to understand anything on my audio sample. That and the re-captcha system helps digitize books while areyouhuman is just playing games. Even though I hate captcha it makes me feel like I'm helping digitize a book when I use recaptcha, so I feel better about it. On the other hand your games are interesting and dare I say it, a little bit addictive, especially with all those congratulatory stars at the end.
I wonder if a good approach would be to provide an audio-only website if you use the audio-only CAPTCHA? Cracking one word is one thing, but if the website then goes on with "Press 1 for your account balance..."
