It presents you with a grid of pictures of animals and you pass authorisation if you can successfully click all the kittens (or pandas, or foals, or whatever animal it tells you to click) from amongst the other species.

It works extremely well. Much simpler and quicker than text-based CAPTCHAs, and you won't run into the reasonably frequent ambiguity of the is-that-a-4-or-an-h? type.

It was only a matter of time, I suppose, before it got adapted. Someone came up with the brainwave of using images from amihotornot.com (which has an API, can you believe it) and the test becoming to click the 'hot' folk and ignore the not-hot.

A perhaps not terribly respectful adaptation, but if you consider that the scores on amihotornot reflect the collective opinion of often thousands of folk, likely to be very accurate and reliable.

You'd think.

Maybe I have weird taste, because I find it much more difficult to spot the 'hotties' than to spot the kittens.

I came across this stuff while looking (again) into ways of preventing comment spam on my wordpress blog. I think I may have a go at implementing kittenauth.

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