Professors at UCLA (University of California) in Irvine have published the results of a study showing that bots can solve annoying captcha tests on websites faster and better than humans.
“I’m not a robot.”
What is a Captcha check? Captcha tests, the scourge of the internet, are known to everyone who surfs the internet regularly and has to solve random image or character tasks before entering text in online forms. Ideally, the requirements are easy for us humans to solve and at the same time a technical obstacle against malicious bots that try to flood online services such as forums, guest books and the registration of e-mail addresses with their automatic requests.
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The study: man versus machine
How was it done? Gene Tsudik and his colleagues at UCLA conducted a study to find out how humans fare against bots when it comes to solving captcha tests as quickly and accurately as possible. To do this, they first analyzed the 200 most popular websites in the world, of which 120 used Captcha tests.
Then the 1,000 people from their pool of candidates of different ages, genders, places of residence and different educations each had to solve 10 Captcha tasks.
What results have been achieved? Compared to the bots, humans have consistently achieved worse results. While the human participants showed between 50 and 84 percent accuracy in a test with distorted text and took between 9 and 15 seconds to solve the tasks, the bots were 99.8 percent error-free and took less than one to complete the task Second.
A race between website operators and bot developers
Some of these results question the usefulness of Captcha tests and thus also put the underlying programming effort for website developers to the test.
In this game of cat and mouse, the technical requirements become more and more advanced in order to keep bots away from online forms and on the other hand bypass protection. Algorithms are already being worked on that will try to identify and block interactions between bots on websites as such in the background, instead of continuing to rely on annoying tests that have to be solved by humans.
What are your experiences with captcha tasks? Do you find them unnecessary or do you see them as a necessary means of preventing spam from bots?
Bots are also sometimes a very big problem in games.