The Future of the CAPTCHA: Interactive Advertising

I’ve recently done quite a bit of research around using CAPTCHA’s to protect against automated form submissions on web pages. Unfortunately CAPTCHA’s are a thing of the past and it’s my belief that interactive advertising is next big alternative.

CAPTCHA’s have been common place on logon and registration forms for almost a decade now. However recent research conducted by industry leaders has shown that CAPTCHA’s are no longer very effective. In fact, there are several company’s that now offer CAPTCHA solving as a service, where humans will solve them for pennies. In fact just this year Google’s Recaptcha service moved from a user input driven model to a completely data analytic model for verification. This change was largely because of one of Google’s own research fellows released a paper describing how to programmatically beat the recaptcha over 70% of the time.

So what’s next? It’s my belief that one of the new interactive advertising firm on the internet will likely soon pull through as a leader in automated form submission protection. This may sound like an unusual combination, but it really does make since. With the payouts for conventional advertising online dropping rapidly, due to increased add relestate, site owners are looking for more ways to supplement hosting costs. Advertisers are also looking for new ways to engage their audience and new social science research shows that getting people to interact with your brand makes them more likely to buy.

I guess the the other question is will interactive advertising really protect against programmatic form submissions and increase the overall security of said website? I believe if site owns force users to participate in the add and only process form submissions once they have validated with the adds API. It should still stop rapid form submissions from being processed and make it significantly harder for attackers to find injection vulnerabilities.

The only question that remains to be answered is will these interactive advertising provide enough entropy and data analytics to ensure that they can’t easily be solved or bypassed.

Ad-Play: Experiments to Better Understand Online Advertising

Some of my readers may have recently noticed the introduction of online advertising, being displayed at the top and bottom of all pages. Although some may not believe me, this is by no means a money making scheme. I have recently become intrigued by the online advertising and search engine optimization space. I want to try and better understand how search engines make decisions like page ranking, content trustworthiness, site indexing, and file parsing/usage. I hope to gain insight into these activities by leveraging heavy logging and analytics for this blog and my other sites. Over the next few months I hope to collect data related to several experiments with analytics services, ad services, and even testing the impact of factitious postings, malicious takeover, and even out of topic postings.

So in short, Yes, there are now adds on the site. No, I don’t make many really any money off of them. On a good day I may make a single penny. In fact, most of the experiments i’ve been conducting have caused quite a large decline in the pay per viewers (RPM/RPC). The advertising, analytics, and tracking are all just means to collect data to try and better understand the effects each of these experiments has on the overall operation of a standard website.

If you normally use adblock or other online advertising/tracking prevention mechanizes to stop those pesky ads or to maintain your privacy.  I formally request that you continue to due so, when interacting with this site, as its a valid aspect of this type of testing. However, please note that all requests sent to this site, and all data sent in response is being logged. There is no way to opt out of this type of logging. Although I would hate to lose reader because of these changes, I fully understand, and recommended checking social media for updates related to this logging being disabled.

Updates related to future experiments, supporting data, and findings will be posted in the future when time permits.