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one of the most irritating things about modern life you know other than

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political polarization stagnating wages and the feeling of somehow being

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socially isolated in a hyperconnected environment is how difficult these

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stupid little capture puzzles have gotten but why is this happening a while

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ago we did an episode on those super simple i'm not a robot recaptchas and

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those aren't that bad you just click a box and that's it but now it seems like

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we're having to solve these arcane picture puzzles sometimes multiple times

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simply to read a news article so what gives well part of it is that the

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evolution of captchas to become more annoying is part of an ongoing arms race

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between spam malware and shopping bots on the one side and cloud and website

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operators trying to stop them on the other back in the day bots were so dumb

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that just a slightly distorted word or two could send them packing but of

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course it was quite easy for fleshy humans to understand what was on the

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screen but unsurprisingly there's been a lot of investment over the past couple

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decades into automated optical character recognition or ocr which helps digitize

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old books and other publications so that they're more easily searchable doing

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this requires ais to discern text even if it's distorted in some way so over

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the years efforts were made to make them better at this and unsurprisingly the

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text we put into those little captcha tests helped the ais do this many captchas use

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scans of distorted words from real books or newspapers and because we humans took

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so many of these tests we trained ais to become very good at them but

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unfortunately ai algorithms can be used by bots so we stopped using word-based

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captures and moved on to those little picture puzzles which i'll complain

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about more after this message from our sponsor jackery jackery's explorer 1500

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captures proved more effective than word captures but guess what

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google who's responsible for producing many of those picture puzzles uses human

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input on those to train their ais as well

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if you've noticed how lots of these captures are photos of street signs

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traffic lights and crosswalks etc it's because google is taking all

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that data that you give it when solving these puzzles and using that information

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to help build ais for self-driving cars

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as well as to improve the quality of results on google maps and again ai's

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got really good at solving these puzzles so the folks behind captcha have been

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making them progressively harder much to the chagrin of you the average internet

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user who's just trying to bulk by toilet paper online instead of schlepping up to

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walmart but is there an end in sight to this arms race the way those i'm not a

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robot boxes work without forcing you to solve a puzzle is by tracking your

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in-browser behavior how fast you type how you move your mouse around even the

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way you switch tabs to determine that you're human and not a bot that can

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input paragraphs of text in a matter of seconds or move a mouse to precisely a

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single pixel location on the screen some engineers believe what we'll end up

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having is a kind of souped-up version of this it's no secret that you're

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constantly being tracked in some form or another while you're online so future

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versions of captcha may not only track the way you type remove your mouse but

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also keep tabs on you more thoroughly through cookies and browser activity to

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determine whether or not you're human such a capture would basically always be

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running in the background on a browser level so while it might

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help us beat the bots there are obvious privacy concerns in addition to the fact

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that bots might end up beating these tests at some point in the future as

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well i just hope it doesn't get to the point where all computers come with a

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usb connected dna sample collectors so thanks for watching guys if you like

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this video hit like hit subscribe tell your friends and hit us up in the comments section

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for your suggestions for topics that we should cover in the future