Google's new reCAPTCHA system is so smart, you won't even know it's there

midian182

Posts: 9,660   +121
Staff member

During the time you’ve spent as a denizen of the internet, you’ll have doubtlessly come across plenty of Completely Automated Public Turing tests to tell Computers and Humans Apart – better known by their acronym – CAPTCHAs.

Attempting to make out distorted words and numbers, or selecting specific things from a grid of images can be annoying, but Google’s ‘No CAPTCHA reCAPTCHA’ made the process of identifying humans much easier by simply clicking a checkbox. Now, the next version of the system won’t even require any interaction from a person; Google’s making the system invisible.

Machine learning and advanced risk analysis techniques allow the process to take place completely in the background. The system can "actively consider a user's engagement with the CAPTCHA — before, during, and after — to determine whether that user is a human." If the algorithms identify a possible bot, one of the older CAPTCHA tests will appear.

Google’s introduction of No CAPTCHA reCAPTCHA in 2014 brought a welcome improvement over the image-based method. It checked variables such as IP address and mouse movements to determine if a user was human - all they now had to do was click a box. The new, invisible system builds on No CAPTCHA reCAPTCHA and still takes into account data such as cookies, but there’ll be no more checkboxes.

Google notes that its CAPTCHAs offer more than just protection from bots. The results have been used to translate texts, verify street addresses in its Street view mapping service, preserve novels and articles, and build machine learning datasets.

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Well thank god the lizard overlords are getting their act together. It was really bothering me to know which sites were genuinely backed and supported by Google with their gatekeeper functions visible for all to see and avoid. Look for more background processing with multiple 'cloud' addresses not registered directly to Google.
 
SA, please take notice (I joke, of course)
32 tabs covering companies open does Not mean that I need the Background tabs constantly updated (generating a captcha). Suggest that you simply, uhmm, Stop Updating in constant real time on background tabs when the 'no activity' algo is reached?

nah, too simple, how'mIgunnajustifymyconsultantbillingwi'dat?..

(I get Such a kick outa' identifying street-sign and mountain pictures, day after day after day..)
 
I see an arms race here. Sure, Google can get the upper hand with this technology, for a while. But going forward, it's going to become more difficult to tell bots and humans apart. Whatever criteria Google uses to identify a real human will eventually be spoofed. Mouse movements? That's trivial to spoof. IP address? Not so hard. Cookies? A bot can accumulate them just as easily as a human can.

Credit Google for staying in the fight. But the fight isn't over.
 
"..you won't even know it's there." That's how their bosses at the CIA/NSA like it.
 
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