"So much for CATPCHA then," writes Richard Currie, commenting on the news that bots can now complete bot-warding challenges faster than meat people can.
Tests designed to be easy for humans to pass, but to trip up software, have long been a feature of websites. Over time, types of CAPTCHA – which stands for Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart – have become more advanced, and gradually trickier to solve, at least for us.
Now, Gene Tsudik at the University of California, Irvine, and his colleagues have shown that bots have little problem solving the current crop of tests faster than humans, and suggest the tests are more trouble than they are worth.
"We do know for sure that they [the tests] are very much unloved. We didn't have to do a study to come to that conclusion," he said.
It's interesting gaming out what becomes of the uncredentialed "request and get" web without captcha, which served to limit (or at least put a price on) spam, abuse and excessive use while tracking, training learning models, and creaming off other odd benefits from the human interaction gotten from the challenges. Perhaps the future is "no credentials, no access" down to the last request.
