The Information Age is evolving so quickly that sometimes we don’t take notice of the change that affects our security wither it’s online or in person. One example of this is the CAPTCHA. This is the internet’s way of determining authentication which was a tad bit ubiquitous and then it faded away. We longer questioned it.
What is CAPTCHA?
What does CAPTCHA stand for? It’s an acronym for Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computer and Humans Apart. Whoa! That was a mouthful. The engineers at Carnegie Mellon University developed this system around the 2000s which was led by Luis von Ahn. The motivation for this was to filter spambots and armies of things that pretend to be people.
How did it work?
Well, just like how you know it now. The program is set to form warped or garbled texts that computers have a hard time deciphering. On the other hand, humans can make out the words. The only thing that’s left to do is to type the words in the box to gain access. It’s an easy piece of tool. The design was wildly received, and CAPTCHA became a tool everyone seemed to trust. But the problem is that it’s developers forget one thing about humans: they have a need to get compensated. Not long after that, spam-sponsored CAPTCHA farms began to appear. This is especially true in developing countries when people were offered money to solve for thousands of CAPTCHA. With this in mind, it’s engineers weren’t satisfied with the labor. So they rethought CAPTCHA and implemented it on many websites. The user experience was similar by typing in the numbers and letters on the screen. Instead of using words, users were asked to translate the images to numbers and words. On the other hand, Google analysis started something more complex than the innovation of CAPTCHA. They’ve unveiled a system that looks at the behavior of every user. This invisible algorithm can detect unusual interaction with your account to see whether you’re a robot or human.