UCLA professors (University of California) in Irvine have published research findings from a study that show bots can solve the annoying captcha tests on websites faster and better than we humans.
“I am not a robot.”
What is a captcha test? Captcha tests, the scourge of the internet, are known to anyone who regularly uses the internet and has to solve randomly generated image or character tasks before entering text in online forms. Ideally, the requirements posed are easy for us humans to solve and at the same time serve as a technical barrier against malicious bots trying to flood online services like forums, guestbooks, and email registration with their automated requests.
The study: Human vs. Machine
How was it conducted? Gene Tsudik and his colleagues from UCLA conducted a study to find out how humans compare to bots when it comes to solving captcha tests as quickly and accurately as possible. They first analyzed the 200 most popular websites in the world, of which 120 use captcha tests.
Then, 1,000 people from their candidate pool of various ages, genders, locations, and education levels had to solve 10 captcha tasks each.
What results were achieved? In comparison with the bots, humans consistently achieved poorer results. While human participants could demonstrate an accuracy between 50 and 84 percent in a test with distorted text and took between 9 and 15 seconds to solve the tasks, the bots were 99.8% error-free and completed the tasks in less than a second.
A race between website operators and bot developers
These results partially question the usefulness of captcha tests and thus also put the programming effort behind it for website developers to the test.
In this cat-and-mouse game, the technical requirements are becoming increasingly sophisticated to keep bots away from online forms while simultaneously attempting to circumvent the protection. Algorithms are already being developed that try to identify and block the interactions of bots on websites in the background instead of continuing to rely on annoying tests that must 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 against spam from bots?
