What Are CAPTCHAs And Why Should You Care?

Remember these?

Gone are the ancient days when you used to solve trivial puzzles and type in characters to show you are human or not.

It wasn’t long before I personally realized this.

Only recently did I pay attention to the fact that the “I am not a human” button does not require me to elaborate on my humanity.

Now, only a single button does that trick.

And like all shiny innovations on the Internet, we can thank the engineers at Google for this convenience.

By now, you are probably wondering why the need for all this mess?

Why the heck do I need to prove my human-ness to a machine?

Need For CAPTCHAs

We have all seen spammed messages on Youtube comments, sketchy reviews on Amazon, or products getting out of stock in a matter of seconds.

The common theme to all these things — aside from being frustrating — is a web robot. Or a bot for shorthand.

These so-called bots are programs created made by human developers for a specific purpose on the Internet. And this purpose ranges from harmless and helpful like chatbots to malicious like trojan bots.

Take the example of Amazon products getting out-of-stock.

We humans have a limited reaction time to click that buy now button. But the click bots are incredibly fast, and they can click that button almost as soon as it pops up on our screen.

While they sound very helpful, they can ease the jobs of black-market sellers looking to buy all exclusive sneakers for reselling. Which leaves very little quantity of time for real customers like us.

To counter this Robo-havoc, security teams devised a security measure to ensure only real humans do certain things — like buying — on the Internet.

This measure was named as “Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart”, which certainly was a mouthful. So they shortened it to CAPTCHA.

And like the Internet, they evolved with time.

Evolution of CAPTCHAs

The very first version of CAPTCHA required users to type in distorted letters and numbers which was difficult for bots to do at that time, but unsurprisingly easy for people.

While it received criticisms from people with disabilities and tediously long 10-second delay, it largely remained successful in blocking bots.

Many companies implemented CAPTCHAs in their services like Yahoo and eBay. However, it was Paypal that helped popularise the early commercial use of CAPTCHAs.

Soon though, the bots started catching up. With the advent of Machine Learning and AI, bots could now identify hidden patterns like characters. And thus bypassing the early CAPTCHAs.

Responding to these drawbacks, Google implemented a very popular deployment of CAPTCHA, called “RECAPTCHA”.

Early RECAPTCHA looked very familiar to CAPTCHAs, but their functionality changed drastically over time.

The newer CAPTCHAs didn’t depend on the user response, but rather the behavior of the user online.

And soon we were left with a magical button which tells us if we’re human or not.

How does this magic button work?

This magic button, also called “No CAPTCHA RECAPTCHA” is the latest in the series of CAPTCHAs by Google. And it has a very complex mechanism hidden behind its relatively simple functionality.

It performs a series of checks, like how quickly you clicked on the button and the movement of your cursor before, while, and after you clicked it.

It also takes into account your online activity before you came into the said RECAPTCHA verified site.

Google has largely remained silent on its exact algorithm, but if you really are interested, you can check out their security blog which explains it in more detail.

Conclusion

We might think that CAPTCHAs solve the bot problem, but we have to think again.

With the improvement of AI, the bots become stronger and harder to detect. And in response, CAPTCHA developers continue to adapt their software.

We have come a long way in our quest to fight the robots, figuratively of course.

And the journey has only just started.

So next time you encounter the magic button, do take your time to appreciate its beauty.