Google, it is high time to eliminate CAPTCHAS

Google aimed to eliminate CAPTCHAs to verify if individuals were human or bots in order to safeguard websites from spam and deceit – albeit with a unique approach. Instead of using deliberately garbled letters (easily decipherable by humans but not bots), Google proposed to employ randomly distorted characters – unclear scans sourced from the Google Books Library Project. For instance, if a significant number of users correctly identified a vague character as an “E,” that designation would be confirmed or rectified within the digital book scan.

The primary goal of this endeavor was to engage internet users worldwide in a voluntary capacity, prompting them to discern characters while simultaneously hindering illicit bots. Subsequently, Google introduced reCAPTCHA to facilitate human verification of dubious Street View and Maps images, such as residential addresses, street signs, and commercial names and locations. More recently, Google has harnessed reCAPTCHA to bolster its expansive AI endeavors encompassing maps, computer vision, speech recognition, and cybersecurity.

Numerous variations of CAPTCHAs exist – text-centric, image-based, audio-based, mathematical challenges, word quandaries, time-sensitive prompts, honeypot tasks, visual recognition, and concealed prompts. The prevalent versions are the click-the-checkbox CAPTCHAs and the click-the-images-containing-a-bus CAPTCHAs. Both of these are under the purview of Google’s reCAPTCHA v2.

About Author

AndyC

Andy Curtis is an award-winning security consultant, researcher and public speaker. He has been working in the computer security industry since the early 1990s, having been employed by state and federal government, leading healthcare and banking providers across three continents. He has given talks about computer security for some of the world’s largest companies, worked with law enforcement agencies on investigations into hacking groups, and is a regular voice on TV and radio explaining IT security threats.

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