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A Vision For a World Free of CAPTCHAs

Posted by Soulskill on from the is-that-an-oh-or-a-zero dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Slate argues that we're going about verifying humans on the Web all wrong: 'As Alan Turing laid out in the 1950 paper that postulated his test, the goal is to determine whether a computer can behave like a human, not perform tasks that a human can. The reason CAPTCHAs have a term limit is that they measure ability, not behavior. ... the random, circuitous way that people interact with Web pages — the scrolling and highlighting and typing and retyping — would be very difficult for a bot to mimic. A system that could capture the way humans interact with forms algorithmically could eventually relieve humans of the need to prove anything altogether.' Seems smart, if an algorithm could actually do that."

4 of 168 comments (clear)

  1. Just a Thought... by ryanleary · · Score: 5, Insightful

    It seems to me that if you can design an algorithm to verify how humans interact with a computer, it should be relatively trivial to engineer an algorithm that mimics this interaction?

    Maybe someone smarter than I could clarify?

    1. Re:Just a Thought... by Nazlfrag · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Using anything other than a human to judge the behaviour puts it outside of the Turing test. So not only does their proposed solution not match the goal they set, it should indeed be defeatable by another algorithm.

    2. Re:Just a Thought... by major_fault · · Score: 5, Insightful

      No algorithm will do. Ultimately the question that must be solved is whether the user is malicious or not. Best possibilities so far are the tried and true invitation system and excluding malicious users from the system. Malicious users are also users who keep including other malicious users. Easily detectable with proper moderation system that needn't be gotten into right here and now.

  2. Tech Support by cjfs · · Score: 5, Funny

    I can see it now: "have you tried moving your mouse around randomly?", "how about clicking on a few different parts of the page then making coffee?", "still not working? Try slamming the mouse down several times", "okay, as a last resort click on the tabloid pop-up."