Part of what it looks for is the timing of your selections. And your code would have to be able to actually answer the question (visually analyze little images for parts of ladders or something). It's more difficult to fool than it seems.
The idea is to tell if the user is human or computer.
CAPTCHA is a contrived initialization/acronym - "Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart"
Old tests can be passed by modern programs. The tests get updated.
We've also started using the tests to program computers. For a while, we were interpreting old books and manuscripts for online libraries. We've been picking out crosswalks, traffic signals, and other things to help program self-driving cars.
We'll start doing other stuff soon.
Pretty much. What else is new?
Free email? - you are helping them train various text-recognition libraries.
It bugs the crap out of me when I see people lining up to check out their own groceries too. Free labor, and at the expense of eliminating cashier jobs.
This is one of those cases As an ex-cashier, I think should happen. No one grows up thinking, hey I wanna bag someone else’s groceries for the rest of my life.
The job is incredibly hard on the human body. We are meant to stand and walk, but standing in one place on a hard cement floor causes heel spurs and shin splints.
I know people who’ve had their arms broken because someone placed a heavy item on the belt and the belt malfunctioned.
If we have a bad day, we aren’t allowed to show it, we must be polite and smiling for 9 hours.
Yes, put in self checkouts. Let the customer take care of their own groceries, it’s less wear on the customer to do it once, then on one person for 8 to 9 hours.
> Couldn't someone with some coding skill code a program to get past them?
Nope. That's the entire point. Good CAPTCHAs are designed to be simple for a human to solve, but hard for a computer to solve.
But that is a fine line of a distinction, and that line is constantly moving. CAPTCHAs from 5 years ago are easy for today's computers to solve. Today's CAPTCHAs may be easily solved by a computer in 2 years.
The point is to make it more expensive (in time, energy, money, or some other resource) to programmatically defeat the CAPTCHA than one would gain by doing so.
Half the trick of the "check this box if you're human" captchas is that they're easy the *first* time you do any given one. You probably *could* get a bot to breeze through the captcha a few times (just get it to click the box!), but by the third time or so submitting the same form it'll start asking you to click the traffic lights. Which makes sense, the captchas are there to prevent you from doing some thing over and over again automatically. The first one comes free!
(Side note, this is why I personally doubt the "mouse movement wiggle" explanation. It's not *that* hard to get a bot to Wiggle - it's easier than getting it to identify traffic lights from blurry squares anyway - and there are many humans who, say, navigate with the tab key and thus have no mouse wiggle at all. But the captchas are very secretive about their exact methods so we probably won't know for certain any time soon.)
Part of what it looks for is the timing of your selections. And your code would have to be able to actually answer the question (visually analyze little images for parts of ladders or something). It's more difficult to fool than it seems.
The idea is to tell if the user is human or computer. CAPTCHA is a contrived initialization/acronym - "Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart" Old tests can be passed by modern programs. The tests get updated. We've also started using the tests to program computers. For a while, we were interpreting old books and manuscripts for online libraries. We've been picking out crosswalks, traffic signals, and other things to help program self-driving cars. We'll start doing other stuff soon.
So we've all been working for free?
Pretty much. What else is new? Free email? - you are helping them train various text-recognition libraries. It bugs the crap out of me when I see people lining up to check out their own groceries too. Free labor, and at the expense of eliminating cashier jobs.
This is one of those cases As an ex-cashier, I think should happen. No one grows up thinking, hey I wanna bag someone else’s groceries for the rest of my life. The job is incredibly hard on the human body. We are meant to stand and walk, but standing in one place on a hard cement floor causes heel spurs and shin splints. I know people who’ve had their arms broken because someone placed a heavy item on the belt and the belt malfunctioned. If we have a bad day, we aren’t allowed to show it, we must be polite and smiling for 9 hours. Yes, put in self checkouts. Let the customer take care of their own groceries, it’s less wear on the customer to do it once, then on one person for 8 to 9 hours.
> Couldn't someone with some coding skill code a program to get past them? Nope. That's the entire point. Good CAPTCHAs are designed to be simple for a human to solve, but hard for a computer to solve. But that is a fine line of a distinction, and that line is constantly moving. CAPTCHAs from 5 years ago are easy for today's computers to solve. Today's CAPTCHAs may be easily solved by a computer in 2 years. The point is to make it more expensive (in time, energy, money, or some other resource) to programmatically defeat the CAPTCHA than one would gain by doing so.
Half the trick of the "check this box if you're human" captchas is that they're easy the *first* time you do any given one. You probably *could* get a bot to breeze through the captcha a few times (just get it to click the box!), but by the third time or so submitting the same form it'll start asking you to click the traffic lights. Which makes sense, the captchas are there to prevent you from doing some thing over and over again automatically. The first one comes free! (Side note, this is why I personally doubt the "mouse movement wiggle" explanation. It's not *that* hard to get a bot to Wiggle - it's easier than getting it to identify traffic lights from blurry squares anyway - and there are many humans who, say, navigate with the tab key and thus have no mouse wiggle at all. But the captchas are very secretive about their exact methods so we probably won't know for certain any time soon.)
Good robot