I’m Not a Robot…
An Insight Into How You Are Identified as a Human on the Web
I am sure you have seen this phrase whenever you fill out a form or when you sign up for a service. You might have wondered what is this stupid question, why are they asking me whether I am a robot or not. Yeah yeah, I can understand you because even I was wondering why there is something like that. So today I am going to explain why they ask whether you are a robot or not.
Previously, I mean a few years back you must have seen there were pictures with terrible handwriting and you had to type them in order to continue on a website. Otherwise, they won’t let you continue. So these are called “Captchas”. What is this captcha, what is the purpose of it? Well CAPTCHA is an acronym.
So the purpose of this captcha is to protect the internet from scammers and bots. Let me give you an example. There are password attacks that try to track your passwords and gain access to your accounts. One of those password attacks is a brute force attack. Simply it is a program that tries a different combination of passwords until it finds your password to log into your account. So this captcha is capable of preventing executing such attacks. Similarly, a bot is also a program that uses web services automatically in a repetitive manner. Some spammers use these bots to spread unnecessary trash very rapidly.
A captcha may be seen very easy to solve for you. But in reality, these captchas are hard to detect for bots. Now let me say you another interesting fact. Will you believe me if I say that you are an unpaid employee of Google? Sounds interesting huh? Google uses these captchas for their book-scanning project which digitize books. They enter words for captchas that their software could not recognize.
Google even uses this captcha to enhance google maps to be more accurate. They prompt users' street numbers and names which their software could not identify. Likewise, there are many types of captchas. Sometimes there are even small interesting games. They are very easy for humans but it makes the life of bots difficult. That is better…
Nowadays the most popular captcha is no Captcha. Mmmm yeah no captcha. It is the latest method of captcha. I am sure most of you have experienced this one. So in this, you simply have to click a checkbox to prove that you are a human. WHAT?? JUST TO CLICK A CHECKBOX TO PROVE YOU ARE HUMAN??? Okay okay, don’t panic it is not simple as we think. The way this no captcha recognizes you as a human is depending on your behavior. Not that day to day behavior so don’t worry. They recognize the behavior of your mouse. The way you use the mouse to click the checkbox. So normally humans can’t and don’t use the mouse in a perfectly straight line. But a bot use cursor in a perfectly straight line very fast. Not only that but also this no captcha recognize if you access the resource too often. If you access resources too often it may recognize you as a bot.
Another captcha you might have seen is recognizing images. I am sure you must have done this several times. You just have to pick the relevant images. Google uses this data to categorize images based on your selection. So unknowingly you are supporting machine-learning. Interesting facts right? Then these data are used for Google projects such as Google’s picture search and many other apps.
If you don’t like to select images you have an option to listen to an audio clip that is distorted. You can select that from the headphone sign in the bottom.
So I think now you know a simple idea about why these captchas ask you whether you are a human or robot. Stay tuned for many more interesting articles.
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