to continue watching this video prove that you are a human by clicking on
every box that contains Aus who are we
kidding we welcome all viewers organic or robotic here at Techquickie but back
on topic odds are you've probably seen
little tests like that scattered around the internet when you're trying to post
a comment create an account or buy something they're called captas which
stands for completely automated public Turing tests to tell computers and
humans apart proving once again that the
computer science Community continues to struggle with the concept of acronyms
anyway the irony of using Computing
techniques to trick other computers
isn't really new le speak which goes all
the way back to the early 1980s originated as a method of preventing
content from being easily searchable and
to work around obstacles like profanity filters a use that is still common to
this day but modern capture didn't come
around until the late 1990s when the
then popular search engine altav Vista
man I'm old was trying to find a way to
prevent Bots or automated computer programs from adding tons of spam and
malicious URLs to their link database
they wanted to put some kind of barrier in place and approach the problem by
thinking about something that both humans and computers were good at namely
optical character recognition which you can learn more about here then
introducing elements that made the task
much more difficult for computers while keeping it fairly easy for humans and
since computers of the day could only recognize clear easyto read text TT
altavista's Engineers forced the user or
the bot as it were to read a puzzle with
distorted misaligned text with stray
marks in order to submit a URL to the database cool right this form of capture
continues to be quite popular along with
audio capture for the visually impaired that in a similar vein typically
includes spoken letters that are somewhat garbled to defeat autom ated
sound analysis q
y26 w you'll see it employed in
situations ranging from preventing Bots
from signing up for social media accounts to cut down on spam to
verification on ticket buying websites to ensure that Bots working for ticket
scalpers can't snatch up all the tickets to popular events you might even see
captas more frequently if you're using a VPN service and as many website
administrators are aware that vpns are a
popular tool that scammers can use to conceal their identities so a request
from a known VPN IP address is more
likely to trigger a capture prompt but
there's a bit more to it than simply presenting the scheming bot with a
confusing image capture scripts also
need to be written securely so that the correct answer is isn't available to the
bot through a back door for example some
capture scripts especially many freely available ones render the text on the
user's computer instead of on the server and handle the answer in plain text
meaning that a bot can be written to steal the answer without ever solving
the puzzle but even if proper security is implemented Bots are also getting a
lot more sophisticated than they used to be and greater processing power has
enabled them to use machine learning to get better at solving these kinds of
captas so everything from image recognition puzzles to trivia questions
have been employed to stay one step ahead of the spam bot arms race but
lonus what about those prompts that I've been seeing these days that just say I'm
not a robot and then I just check a box I mean couldn't a robot do that how does
that work well this is a pretty cool mechanism from Google called No capture
it actually tracks your mouse movements right before you check the box humans
tend to move their mice in Wiggly imperfect ways when they want to point
at something whereas this behavior is usually absent with a bot no capture
also looks at your IP address and cookie activity to see if it's probably
consistent with a Human Instead of a bot
and this automation has made it much faster and less frustrating for the user
increasing its popularity it's generally regarded as reliable which is cool but
back to that face I made before it has privacy Advocates concerned about how
much information it's sending to Google and uh how exactly is it being
used oh that Google but considering how many people
see an opportunity to make a quick Buck by deploying spam Bots as the internet's
influence continues to grow it isn't likely we'll see the human verification
arms race cool down anytime soon I just
hope that it doesn't reach the point where we have to submit like a DNA
sample and like a stool sample just to downvote somebody on Reddit TunnelBear
VPN vpns are great for more than just spammers and scammers by the way they
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two things happen one your connection gets get encrypted with AES 256-bit
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BS that often comes with VPN use no DNS
ports blah blah blah none of that stuff they've also got a top rated privacy
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when you go wow this is great I can watch that soccer game or I can buy that
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Tunnel bear.com Linus so thanks for watching guys like
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