ShoZu's hieroglyphics prove you're human

Forget Descartes and his classically profound notion of human existence, "Cogito ergo sum." These days, cracking a short cryptograph is what proves hominid status.

ShoZu's cryptogram proves you're human, and can follow directions.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

Assailed by several DDOS (distributed denial of service) attacks, ShoZu (review), a mobile and Web media-sharing service, switched from the 6 to 8 character authentication system to a series of encoded glyphs you have to translate in order to pass the I'm-a-human qualification required of ShoZu account holders.

While uploading and downloading media feeds between the mobile phone and Web doesn't seem like such a security risk, ShoZu CEO Mark Bole explains that for companies like his, the more complex system reduces financial risk.

"To make things simpler for the user, we're sending invisible SMSs to verify the device," said Bole, a cost ShoZu shoulders. The more false accounts are created by bots or dedicated cyberhooligans, the more expenses ShoZu has. Just be glad ShoZu also provides a key.

[ShoZu Jambo]

It might look complex but it's not ;-)

Thanks for the story on our Captcha!

We put a lot of thought into this one after a denial of service attack saw our premium SMS gateway abused. So in an effort to keep the service running smoothly for our loyal users one of our server engineers, Alex, came up with this masterpiece. It's worked a charm!

It's not as complex as it may first appear, it's just different really. We've also taken other things into consideration with the design, such as being friendly to color blind users for example.

Best,
Jambo (ShoZu)

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