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[Greg Broiles]

> I don't follow the other list you mentioned, so I don't know what the
> actual problem to solve is - my guess is that this is an anti-bot
> protection measure, intended to make sure that only human participants can
> engage in a conversation.

Yep, that's it.

> If that's the problem - or if it's similar - you'll also need to make the
> puzzle difficult enough that
> it's hard to brute-force or solve statistically - let's say you provide
the
> other party with 20 images,
> 19 cats and 1 dog, and ask them to identify the dog.
>
> What keeps a bot from answering the question 20 times? Let's assume the
> first arms-race countermeasure prevents answering the question more than
> once by generating puzzles on-the-fly from known cat and dog images - so
> the bot just picks an answer randomly, and keeps doing that until they
hit.

Oops... never thought of that.

> Can God create a rock so big he can't lift it?

No, just as he can't create round squares. What's that got to do with
anything?

> This sounds like maybe it's essentially a credentialling/ID problem, where
> you're generating credentials on the fly based on a short-form Turing
test.
> Can you restate the problem so that instead of a Turing test it's a more
> familiar multi-channel authentication process? (e.g., require new
> participants to have "introductions" from existing participants, track
> introductions, and remove the access for accounts found to be bots, or
> found to have introduced bots .. or similar.)

Well... one of the points of Freenet is to have anonymity (even if not
cryptographically strong, just statistical anonimity). I don't know how well
that can work with "introductions". [Maybe the public / private key
proposals - which I haven't followed up closely - could me modified to be
used as some sort of a pseudonym.]

Mark