Captcha – A Term That We Come Across Daily, But Ignore

CAPTCHA – A disoriented words which are found in most of the websites we browse on the internet. I can bet that at least once daily we enter these jumbled dancing letters in a box when we indulge in a task online.

For example, while booking a train ticket in IRCTC website.

It is a sad and also a true fact that captcha is one of the plugins which most of us ignore without knowing his importance.

How many of us know the importance of a Captcha?

I do admit that I ignored this term until yesterday like most of you who are reading this article. I do not know much about it. Was thinking that it is there to ensure that humans are accessing the internet and not the Aliens. Though I know it is a security feature, I had never bothered to get to know how much important it is.

Ha Ha Ha…

I feel like laughing when I recollect the understanding I had on Captcha until yesterday. May be, I had correlated it more with an Alien after watching the movie “The Independence Day”.

Acronym of CAPTCHA:

The term CAPTCHA stands for,

Completely
Automated
Public
Turing test to tell
Computers &
Humans are
Apart.

In my words: An automated test to differentiate between Computers and Human Beings.

What is a Turing Test?

It is a method for identifying whether or not a computer is capable of thinking like a human. This test is the basis for the philosophy behind Artificial Intelligence (AI).

What Is A CAPTCHA?

• It is a plug in available in most of the web forms to enhance security.

• They block or manage spammers, non-human visitors like a bot from posting wherever they want in a web form.

Example: Imagine, you are booking a movie ticket online and all of a sudden a computer program or a bot, books a lot of tickets in a snap of a finger.

This term we ignore most of the time help us prevent these scenarios from happening.

Bot (aka) web robot – is a software application (based on scripts) that performs automated tasks over the internet.

Why Distortions, Twists & Turns On A Captcha?

Computers are not made out of words. They do not understand words or terms which are distorted and with twists and turns. This is the reason why computer coding came into the picture.

On the other hand, a human can interpret or decipher letters which are out of shape, faded and stretched. Hope this explains to us why it is difficult to create an Intelligent Robot.

So, with the twists and turns, this powerful word misguides or tricks bots from spamming.

The Evolution Of CAPTCHA:

First came the CAPTCHA, founded in the year 2003 by Luis von Ahn and his team of researchers.

CAPTCHA – 2003

Distorted words, which bots had started to handle in short time.

reCAPTCHA – 2008

• Hard words from books were translated to digital texts.

• This version had replaced distorted texts of the previous version.

• This came with the quote Stop Spam. Read Books.

• The digital text taken from the books were difficult for the computers to understand.

• Google had acquired reCAPTCHA, introduced images with street numbers in the captcha box.

Pain Points: It was not helping the people who are visually impaired and people with Dyslexia. Then comes the audio facility to meet the needs.

• Twists and Turns besides Noise came onto the stage.

No CAPTCHA reCAPTCHA – 2014

• A click from the user on “I am not a robot”.

• An HTTP request goes to Google with the details of the user like,

– Internet Protocol (IP) address
– Date and Time
– Geographic Location
– Browser Details
– Time consumed by the user to scroll, drag, navigate, click etc. and more other details.

• Risk Analysis Program at Google analyze the user based on the above details and confirm that the user is a Human and not a Bot.

• If the engine finds it difficult to confirm, then comes another test or challenge for the user. The test is to recognize an image as shown below.

What Next?

Let us wait and see.

Hope, the content helped you to understand what these jumbled words are all about.

Alrighty then, let me see how to get this wonder term plug in added on to my website.

Image Sources & References: uh.edu;pbs.twimg.com;codemyviews.com; Zuck That;