Op-Ed: Fighting spam with empathy

The captcha system was first introduced to combat spam. It stands for Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart. It is in use today on countless websites to prevent the endless spamming of posts and accounts.

According to DVICE, a Swedish group known as the Civil Rights Defenders introduced a pretty neat method of differentiating humans from computers. Before spilling the details, lets back track just a bit. Captchas are annoying, especially when forced to enter the ones that have letters and numbers squished so tightly together that it looks like a giant glob. Nevertheless, it is the only human verification spam fighting system. Civil Rights Defenders introduced a captcha verification system that essentially "measures your ability to empathize like a human being" (DVICE). The concept is actually pretty simple. Three words are generated for every captcha. Based on what the question or statement presented asks, users have to type in the correct word in order to successfully complete the verification process. For example, a statement may ask: In 2011 the freedom of the press was strengthened in Moldova, following a general improvement of the legal and political situation in the country. How does that make you feel? Responses: messy, unpleasant, or quite glad. In this case, the response would be "quite glad". Any other answer would result in a failure in the verification process. Once failed, then a new statement will be generated and then your human integrity will be challenged again. At the moment, the code is open source for anyone to use. Captcha statements and challenge responses are provided by CRD.