A Vision For a World Free of CAPTCHAs 168
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."
Tech Support (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."
Re:Just a Thought... (Score:3, Funny)
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?
You're looking at this all backwards. This isn't the humans attempting to prevent access to the bots. It's the bots getting the humans to speed up their evolutionary arms race.
Think of it, bots trying to determine bot from non-bot. Bots honing their human-infiltration skills vs the best of the bots. It'll be the greatest leap since spam filtering. We'll^WThey'll be getting +5s again on Slashdot in no time!
Re:Just a Thought... (Score:5, Funny)
There's no clear feedback to let a user know *why* he's not being allowed into the system, it's just that the machine doesn't like the look of him.
So it's like dating? ;)
Here's a test (Score:3, Funny)
Can Slate stop writing articles about shit it doesn't know about?
Re:Just a Thought... (Score:2, Funny)
And yes, that must be a capital "5" !