Search giant Google has long requested that users decipher the most ineligible of squiggles to prove to the company that they are not spamming robots, but now the search giant has announced changes to its CAPTCHA forms that will make it easier for users to access what they need.
CAPTCHA stands for “Completely Automated Public Turing Test to tell Computers and Humans Apart” and has long been causing annoyance to anyone wanting to fill in a contact form or communicate online. Many websites required visitors to pass these little tests to confirm they are human in order to prevent cyber attacks, which would involve bots overloading a website with traffic.
CAPTCHA forms involve users copying words from one little box into another, but it wasn’t always as easy as that, as the words were put into fonts that made it difficult for users to recognise. These tasks were designed to make it easy for humans to pass and difficult for machines to, but this was made much harder with those ineligible and nonsensical squiggles.
However, as time elapsed and technology moved on, CAPTCHA evolved and other methods were introduced such as simply ticking the box with the statement “I’m not a robot” beside it, which was introduced back in 2014 and known as No CAPTCHA. Some of these forms even took into consideration where about in the box the user clicks, believing that robots are more likely to tick the box in the centre.
Another version of this test, which is considered to be more smartphone user friendly, includes selecting and matching up an image from a grid of nine different photos.
However, the CAPTCHA as we know it could be soon on its way out after Californian tech giant Google invented a version of the form that is invisible to users and discreetly detects and monitors browsing patterns and behaviour to decide whether or not the website visitor is a human or a robot.
The Invisible reCAPTCHA removes all of the different CAPTCHA elements entirely and makes its decision based on how the user interacts with the website, with variables such as how they clicked on the “submit” button, how the mouse is moved around and even any past data Google holds on you being taken into account instead.
Should a user be deemed human, they won’t need to do anything to prove this to the website, which is good news for all human internet browsers, and will no doubt make this latest evolution of the CAPTCHA form everyone’s favourite to date.
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