Well its been an interesting couple of days. I invented KittenAuth (the single cutest human-verification method ever), published a write up on it and within hours the server was swamped in what can only be described as “the internet”. Been getting lots of hits from Digg, Reddit and a billion other blog that’ve linked here from those stories.
People have expressed wishes for projects for this kind of thing for their blogs. All I can say is wait while I carefully push out a newer version which doesn’t have any of the pitfalls of this version. When I’ve got the new specs out it should be pretty bot-proof.
There have also been a few people saying that this can be hacked just as the hardest CAPTCHA can by getting humans to enter it. Apparently the most common way of doing this is getting users of other sites (usually free-porn sites) to enter the correct combination and the bot goes back with this information. To those people, I say this: Who in the hell do you think is going to click kittens for porn? Ok. Glad we’ve sorted that one out.
Anyway the site was hit pretty hard by Digg but I think I’m **just** going the slip under my bandwidth limit this month. As I’m not allowed to explicitly say “click the adverts” (as to stay within the adsense contract) I’m going to say: If you like what I’m doing you might like what our sponsers are offering so at least read the adverts.
The site has passed the stress test though having handed out 4.2million requests from a total of 36,000 users using 10gigs of bandwidth over a 48 hour period. Thanks to my hosts, Hostek, for continuing to be brilliant and not pulling the plug when things got really insane.
If you have a spare $1 languishing in a long-forgotten (or otherwise) paypal account, please can I suggest you hit my donate button and toss it in my general direction. Might mean I can afford to put extra time into the project and feed my kittycat. Thanks to the few that have clicked donated so far.