Microsoft Wants to Use CAPTCHAs to Serve Ads
Microsoft Wants to Use CAPTCHAs to Serve Ads
Posted 08/26/2009 at 7:09am
| by Pulkit Chandna
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Microsoft wants to pioneer a new form of online advertising by using human interactive proofs, popularly known as CAPTCHAs, to deliver ads. The idea was revealed in a patent application that Microsoft had filed with the US Patent & Trademark Office way back in February 2008.
According to the patent application, made public on August 13, the Redmond-based goliath intends to replace ordinary CAPTCHAs with images, slogans, musical jingles, or other information related to a particular product. In order to gain access to content on the other side of the sponsored CAPTCHA, the user will have to type in the name of the featured product or other related text.
“Unlike so much web-based advertising that accompanies popular web portals such as search and news sites that users can easily ignore, here the user must actively engage in reading and understanding the content in the advertisement in the HIP (human interactive proof) challenge in order to identify the solution to the challenge," the patent filing reads.
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VaMage
August 26, 2009 at 2:12pm
For someone to finally get around to writing a decent anti-HIP app. Come on, once it gets annoying enough it will be worth the effort.
Until then just skip it or use another page to get to the same data, rarely is anything exclusive enough to be worth dealing with a big pain in the ass. Of course MS has perfected little OTHER then being a pain in the ass, so this seems like a natural enough fit.
But think about this seriously for a minute. It's one thing to live through the CAPTCHA to create a new email account, or join a forum, but typing in "XBOX 360" every time you hit a certain page? Not going to happen.What happens when you end up going to the same page 5 or 6 times a day, much less change pages.
Imagine this site using this, every article you click on up pops a CAPTCHA, think it won't, look at how many ads you currently block in a typical site, not here though, thanks MaxPC.
Hell, I quit using my Yahoo Verizon home page when my Firefox app that overrode the autocomplete=”off” tag quit working. Without it you end up typing in your password over and over even with the Yahoo home page still up in a tab and with you fully logged in! Yahoo still hasn't figured out that they are not my freakin bank, and they really don't have anything that needs to be all that damned secure in the first place.
I expect the same thing will happen here, some sites are going to think they are important enough to us to make us CAPTCHA every two seconds and that will be the end of them.
VaMage
American by Birth, But Southern by the Grace of God.
Sonickid101
August 26, 2009 at 11:47am
Thats a damn good idea. unintrusive as CAPTCHA is an already accepted automated security mechanism might as well. Good for Microsoft.
ghen
August 26, 2009 at 11:09am
CAPTCHAs are a neccessary evil and image captchas work decently well as long as they are varied and extremely detailed to fool image parsing programs. Ads fit that bill perfectly as they vary month to month as a fact of the business and they're very detailed to heighten the impact on the customer while delivering a very simple product or slogan. Perfect idea IMO.
HeartBurnKid
August 26, 2009 at 8:54am
All the annoyance of a captcha and an ad, combined!
I swear, they'd tattoo ads on the insides of our eyelids if they could...
winmaster
August 26, 2009 at 8:21am
Sometimes I can't even read CAPTCHA's. I have to poke myself to verify that I am, in fact, human.
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The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.
MeTo
August 26, 2009 at 8:05am
Microsoft has Silver live for free it should include ad's since it's free. Gold live on the other hand you pay for so there should be NO ad's. I will never pay a subscription fee to play games. I do NOT even play games on Xbox live silver.
comptech08
August 26, 2009 at 8:26am
You can't even really do anything cool with a silver account anyway.
winmaster
August 26, 2009 at 8:20am
No one said it would be a part of XBox Live. Also, silver should not have this because its mostly there to sell stuff anyway.
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The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.
Peanut Fox
August 26, 2009 at 7:48am
Fine, any service that Microsoft decides to use this on better be free. I'm not paying a subscription to live if I have to deal with even more ads, especially of this type.
winmaster
August 26, 2009 at 8:19am
They are only going to put them where they already have CAPTCHA's.
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The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.
nekollx
August 26, 2009 at 8:26am
the idea is at least a eyebrow raiser
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