Are CAPTCHAs More Than Just Annoying?
The Atlantic writes:Failing a CAPTCHA isn't just annoying - it keeps people from navigating the internet. Older people can take considerably more time to solve different kinds of CAPTCHAs, according to the UC Irvine researchers, and other research has found that the same is true for non-native English speakers. The annoyance can lead a significant chunk of users to just give up. But is it all also just a big waste of time? The article notes there's now even CAPTCHA-solving services you can hire. ("2Captcha will solve a thousand CAPTCHAs for a dollar, using human workers paid as low as 50 cents an hour. Newer companies, such as Capsolver, claim to instead be using AI and charge roughly the same price.") And they also write that this summer saw more discouraging news:In a recent study from researchers at UC Irvine and Microsoft: - most of the 1,400 human participants took 15 to 26 seconds to solve a CAPTCHA with a grid of images, with 81% accuracy. - A bot tested in March 2020, meanwhile, was shown to solve similar puzzles in an average of 19.9 seconds, with 83% accuracy. The article ultimately argues that for roughly 20 years, "CAPTCHAs have been engaged in an arms race against the machines," and that now "The burden is on CAPTCHAs to keep up" - which they're doing by evolving.The most popular type, Google's reCAPTCHA v3, should mostly be okay. It typically ascertains your humanity by monitoring your activity on websites before you even click the checkbox, comparing it with models of "organic human interaction," Jess Leroy, a senior director of product management at Google Cloud, the division that includes reCAPTCHA, told me. But the automotive site Motor Biscuit speculates something else could also be happening. "Have you noticed it likes to ask about cars, buses, crosswalks, and other vehicle-related images lately?"Google has not confirmed that it uses the reCAPTCHA system for autonomous vehicles, but here are a few reasons why I think that could be the case. Self-driving cars from Waymo and other brands are improving every day, but the process requires a lot of critical technology and data to improve continuously. According to an old Google Security Blog, using reCAPTCHA and Street View to make locations on Maps more accurate was happening way back in 2014... [I]t would ask users to find the street numbers found on Google Street View and confirm the numbers matched. Previously, it would use distorted text or letters. Using this data, Google could correlate the numbers with addresses and help pinpoint the location on Google Maps... Medium reports that more than 60 million CAPTCHAs are being solved every day, which saves around 160,000 human hours of work. If these were helping locate addresses, why not also help identify other objects? Help differentiate a bus from a car and even choose a crosswalk over a light pole. Thanks to Slashdot reader rikfarrow for suggesting the topic.
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