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Can A Robot Fool 'I Am Not A Robot' Captchas? (businessinsider.com)

Business Insider reports on a new video showing a robotic arm apparently defeating the "I am not a robot" captcha test. An anonymous reader quotes their report: The Captcha the robot fools tracks the user's mouse movements to make sure they're a "real" human. So rather than trying to trick it with software -- a tactic that can often be detected -- it goes down the hardware route. Using a capacitive stylus, the robot physically moves the mouse on the trackpad, as if it were a real human wiggling their finger around. The computer doesn't stand a chance.
So all you need is your own robotic arm -- although even then, it's apparently not that simple. The "I am not a robot" captcha grew out of Google's attempts to fight click fraud, according to a 2014 article in Wired, but it does more than watch mouse movements. It also "examines cues every user unwittingly provides: IP addresses and cookies provide evidence that the user is the same friendly human Google remembers from elsewhere on the Web," as well as some undisclosed variables, to create what Google describes as "a bag of cues."

3 of 54 comments (clear)

  1. of course by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Insightful

    If anillegal indo-chip can fool employers with their phony yoga masters degrees, so can a robot

  2. Re:Shouldn't need an actual stylus by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    I keep tripping the I'm not a robot alarm anyway. Turns out they don't like text mode browsers.

  3. Re:Makes no sense by religionofpeas · · Score: 4, Insightful

    A robot arm, trying to follow the same path over and over, will also produce very specific noise that could be detected. So you have the same problem, except it will be more work to generate different patterns.