New ReCAPTCHA Design w/ Risk Analysis

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Source: http://googleonlinesecurity.blogspot.com/2014/12/are-you-robot-introducing-no-captcha.html

This is supposed to put a dent in bots ability to crack the catpchas. It asks for your first name, last name, email address, some stupid question like "what's your favorite color?" and then click "I'm not a bot." Through some database of info I guess they figure out with an algorithm if you're likely to be a bot or not. Probably also with the speed at which you're typing (pasting) and all of that.

If you don't pass for any reason, you can still fill out a typical captcha after clicking "i'm not a robot". The mobile version even has a "match these pictures" type of puzzle.

What do you think the implications of this will be?

In my mind, it's basically just going to require bots to have delays in filling out fields, possibly a way of "typing" instead of pasting. Delays from moving to the next field, spend 30 seconds per form.

This is going to slow down posting speeds, unless you simply increase the number of threads you're running.

I'm not sure if this is really an advance or simply a very short-term hurdle.

I also wonder about all of the information they'll be collecting and selling to advertisers. And the ridiculous database they'll be creatiing along with the Akismet one already and all the other honeypots.

cat_captcha.png
 
Sounds like it'll force bot users to scale horizontally and put in some delays in things. Nothing a zillion more public proxies won't solve.
 
As somebody that writes web bots and crawlers on a daily basis, this isn't going to hurt us too much. It's going to mean we have to use "headless browsers"more often, which is essentially controlling an actual browser rather than just firing HTTP requests. But things like typing into inputs rather than pasting has been possible for a long time now.
 
Yeah, my guess is this might stop a lot of people for a little while until off-the-shelf programs catch up. But the big boys are going to jump this hurdle in a heart beat and scale right back up to effective levels.
 
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