TECH experts have revealed the reason why annoying “I’m not a robot” captcha puzzles are getting harder.
Internet users are often presented with the challenging dilemmas in order to access certain websites and it’s become a hellish loop they’re struggling to overcome.
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Used to safeguard websites from nefarious bots, they’re now preventing many human users from completing the simplest of tasks.
Captcha, which is an acronym for “Completely Automated Public Turing Test to Tell Computers and Humans Apart”, originally made internet users copy a series of letters and numbers.
Now, people are required to select objects that are the same shape or drag them into certain slots.
Once completed, you often have to tick the “I’m not a robot” box.
But a growing number of people have started complaining that the once easy-to-solve Captcha has evolved into a frustrating roadblock to log into a social media account or pay a utility bill.
Kevin Gosschalk, the founder and CEO of Arkose Labs, a web security firm that designs captchas, told The Wall Street Journal that not only will the puzzles become harder, but they’ll also become “stranger”.
This is because “large multimodal models will be able to understand” the puzzles if they don’t increase in difficulty.
Many internet users will also be familiar with having to select a certain number of buses or fire hydrants in a selection of images.
But the task isn’t as simple as it sounds, with tiny fractions of those objects often creeping in to the slot beside it.
This leads to people overthinking and builds up anxiety for fear of getting it wrong – sending you back to the beginning as a result.
The “I am not a bot” puzzles are now based on variables identifying whether a bot could pose a low, medium or high threat to a site.
Arkose Labs claims it only approves its captcha’s if users are able to solve puzzles on the first time.
However, the company admits that its strongest puzzles which are “designed for bad actors” are not impacted by the rates of users completing the model.
According to the cybersecurity firm Cloudfare, captcha tracks the movement of your cursor before anything is clicked.
It’s experts explained: “Even the most direct motion by a human has some amount of randomness on the microscopic level: tiny unconscious movements that bots can’t easily mimic.
“If the cursor’s movement contains some of this unpredictability, then the test decides that the user is probably legitimate.”
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However, the powerful technology doesn’t stop there and might even end up checking out your search history.
Google-owned software reCAPTCHA “may assess the cookies stored by the browser on a user device and the device’s history in order to tell if the user is likely to be a bot,” says Cloudfare.