Why do we always verify that we are not robots
In: Technology
The point of a captcha is that it’s something that a bot couldn’t do easily. Originally, it was garbled text, because that was something a human could read but a bot couldn’t. As computers have gotten smarter, we’ve had to change what we ask people, which is why the captchas have gotten harder and weirder.
If you ever get one that is just “check this box”, that one is looking at the way you move your mouse. The way a human moves a mouse is different than the way a computer would, so if you analyze it, you can tell whether a person is a human. Eventually, that will probably not work, if we haven’t reached that point yet.
The point of captchas is to harass anyone who isn’t easy to track. Websites want to sell every little bit of personal information they can get from your browsing habits, so anything you do that makes that more difficult keeps them from making money off of you. Anonymity is the enemy of the surveillance economy. Therefore, they want to make it inconvenient to use VPNs, for instance.
Because we teach them and train them to bypass captchas. So eventually they manage it and the Captcha industry must catch up and find a new way to distinguish between humans and bots.
If we lose the captcha wars, the robots will win and have access to everything.
I read that the captchas change because the purpose of a particular one was both to have you do something a computer couldn’t (yet) AND to train models so that they could.
When they wanted you to pick the boxes with numbers in them, it was to help Google identify what was a house number. Useful for robot axis to identify that they are in front of the right house or connecting street view data to maps.
Which pictures have stop signs in them or busses or bikes? Useful for automated driving.
It slows down the process.
A bot can only do the process dozens of times a second, rather than thousands of times a second.
Latest Answers