18 March 2024

CAPTCHAs - updated re "I'm Not a Robot" clicks


Embedded image 😀 via Interesting Engineering.  Today I learned that CAPTCHA is an acronym.

Reposted from last year to add some interesting information.
Some people have always presumed the 'I'm not a robot button' functions in a way to catch out artificial intelligence pretending to be human by seeing whether or not a robot is actually capable of identifying the traffic lights or marking the box with a tick...

As BBC's QI revealed in 2020, ticking the little box is actually letting the site check things like your internet browsing history to determine whether you're a real person or not.

"Ticking the box is not the point. It's how you behaved before you ticked the box that is analysed," writer, comedian and broadcaster Sandi Toksvig explained to the panel...

"Essentially, when you are clicking ‘I am not a robot’ box, you are instructing the site to have a look at your data and decide for itself.

"If the machine is not sure, that’s when it directs you to click on lightroom pictures of fire hydrants that aren’t there."

3 comments:

  1. I read somewhere that a computer would move the mouse pointer in a straight line to the box, where a human would have minor deviations on the way to the check box.

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    1. I don't know whether the OS can see the mouse positions before it gets to the box, but I've started slowing down my movement to the box to seem like a human reading the message, just to try to avoid those stupid traffic light identifications.

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    2. The data inside the box is enough

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