The “I Am Not A Robot” box is always at the end of internet forms looking exactly alike from the last time I had checked the box. The exact repetitive graphic nature of the question seems so easy to defeat by even primitive AI.
In: Technology
It’s not just the box. The entire time you have been on the website they have been collecting data on you. Like how you filled things out. What your mouse was doing. Even stuff like what website you were on before this and how you behaved there. All clicking the box does is say I’m done with the bot test you can grade me now.
Actually that’s not how it works at all.
The recapta site tracks the motion of the mouse around it’s little box. The rate and smoothness of the mouse motion, how precisely it stops, and the timing of the click are parameters used to evaluate “human-like” mouse usage from “algorithmic” mouse motion.
When you check that box, what’s really happening is that the web page pulls all of your inputs from the last minute or so. How you’ve scrolled the page, how you typed, how you’ve moved your mouse. If a computer is the one in control, then their inputs will be extremely predictable. Keystrokes are exactly 10 per second, the mouse moves in perfectly straight lines at perfectly consistent speeds, etc. the form will notice those things and deny access. Everything else in the box is just a trick to get you to provide more inputs to analyze.
It doesn’t “protect the internet”. It prevents bots from spamming forms on websites. Nobody with contact form wants to wade through thousands of autogenerated form responses so the use captchas to make sure the form responses are from actual humans.
I’d the captcha isn’t successfully completed the form won’t submit
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From my understanding, it’s not *that* you click the box, it’s *how* you click the box. For example, a robot would move the cursor in a near-perfectly straight line at a near constant speed to get to the Box, which is very non-human-like behavior. The exact way that it works though is a trade secret, which is probably for the best since it means it would be more difficult to write a program to get past it.
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And how does it work in smartphones with touchscreens?
We can’t track the mouse movements here right
There is actually a bunch going on behind the scenes. Google and other Captcha makers haven’t revealed all the things they check but they did say that they analyze mouse movements. The way a human moves a mouse and the way an A.I would move a mouse are actually pretty easy for a computer to tell apart.
Bots aren’t in a browser looking at a GUI like you are, they are scripts that are running and going through the actual code and pushing data into the forms. You can’t check the box using a script, you actually need to be in the browser. So it stops the vast majority of bots from submitting the form.
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