Real Talk: Caught in CAPTCHA Hell

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There's always the issue of pressing security. However, recent CAPTCHAs are becoming more annoying than usual. CAPTCHA means Completely Automated Public Turing. I could understand the concern about bots. However, certain CAPTCHAs are getting way too annoying for common people. In fact, it seems certain CAPTCHAs require excellent puzzle-solving skills, such as this...

Science Line

Some CATCHAs are reasonable. Some, however, are pretty unreasonable. Some of them may not even match up with the connection speed. Even worse, the Science Line also says the following:
Why aren’t CAPTCHAs keeping bots out anymore?  
Bots have gotten better and better at solving CAPTCHAs over the years, largely due to advances in machine learning and artificial intelligence. OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, reported in March that its latest technology successfully tricked a human into filling out a CAPTCHA for it. The bot messaged a person on the freelance labor site TaskRabbit, claiming to be vision impaired and to need help filling out a form. Then, in a sci-fi-esque role reversal, a human completed a CAPTCHA for a bot. 

Bots can already solve most forms of CAPTCHAs at higher success rates than people, according to research from Microsoft and others. Users get CAPTCHAs correct 50-85% of the time, while bots get them right 85-100% of the time. 

There are even programs that will solve CAPTCHAs for you, which could be welcome news for users tired of proving their humanity time and time again. One of these is NopeCHA, a chrome extension Singh Walia uses. “I don’t even have to run an algorithm or a model,” Singh Walia says. “All you have to do is add the extension and it just automatically solves the CAPTCHA for you.” 

But the easy availability of these programs also means that CAPTCHAs are more vulnerable than ever. “There’s no point in displaying such CAPTCHAs anymore,” Singh Walia says. 

CNBC also says this about CAPTCHA tools:

How machines are becoming more like humans

As a standalone cybersecurity tool, CAPTCHAs can be unreliable because of their partially behavioral-based approach. In addition to tracking the user’s ability to solve the puzzle at hand, the tools also monitor actions like how fast they move through a webpage or the curvature of the mouse. Machine learning and artificial intelligence have become more humanlike over the last decade, Hassan said, and are in some ways much more capable at solving large-scale puzzles than humans. With extensive memory that allows machines to process several things at once, solving single puzzles like CAPTCHAs can be a quite simple task for bots.

CAPTCHA solving farms have also been used as an inexpensive way to debunk CAPTCHAs. Bots can be programmed to call out to the human solving farm overseas that decipher the CAPTCHA, all in the timespan of a few seconds.

“We shouldn’t be testing our humans; we shouldn’t be treating our humans like they’re the fraudsters,” Hassan told CNBC Senior Washington Correspondent Eamon Javers at the CNBC Work Summit in October. “We should be testing the bots in different ways, and so increasing friction on humans is not the way to go.”

In today’s world, CAPTCHAs used without any additional layers of cybersecurity protection are typically not enough for most enterprises, said Sandy Carielli, a principal analyst for Forrester. However, when used in tandem with other protection measures, CAPTCHAs may be a feasible measure to prevent bot attacks.

“CAPTCHAs on their own are really only part of the story for a lot of sites,” Carielli said. “You can think of CAPTCHAs as one piece of the puzzle in a lot of cases.”

Carielli’s report, “We All Hate CAPTCHAs, Except When We Don’t,” found that 19% of adults in the United States have abandoned online transactions in the past year when they are met with CAPTCHAs. 

Basically, there are some practical applications for CAPTCHA, but not every freaking time a transaction is made. There could be facial recogniton or other security measures. CAPTCHA can be useful but it can also be frustrating.  

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