one of the most irritating things about modern life you know other than
political polarization stagnating wages and the feeling of somehow being
socially isolated in a hyperconnected environment is how difficult these
stupid little capture puzzles have gotten but why is this happening a while
ago we did an episode on those super simple i'm not a robot recaptchas and
those aren't that bad you just click a box and that's it but now it seems like
we're having to solve these arcane picture puzzles sometimes multiple times
simply to read a news article so what gives well part of it is that the
evolution of captchas to become more annoying is part of an ongoing arms race
between spam malware and shopping bots on the one side and cloud and website
operators trying to stop them on the other back in the day bots were so dumb
that just a slightly distorted word or two could send them packing but of
course it was quite easy for fleshy humans to understand what was on the
screen but unsurprisingly there's been a lot of investment over the past couple
decades into automated optical character recognition or ocr which helps digitize
old books and other publications so that they're more easily searchable doing
this requires ais to discern text even if it's distorted in some way so over
the years efforts were made to make them better at this and unsurprisingly the
text we put into those little captcha tests helped the ais do this many captchas use
scans of distorted words from real books or newspapers and because we humans took
so many of these tests we trained ais to become very good at them but
unfortunately ai algorithms can be used by bots so we stopped using word-based
captures and moved on to those little picture puzzles which i'll complain
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captures proved more effective than word captures but guess what
google who's responsible for producing many of those picture puzzles uses human
input on those to train their ais as well
if you've noticed how lots of these captures are photos of street signs
traffic lights and crosswalks etc it's because google is taking all
that data that you give it when solving these puzzles and using that information
to help build ais for self-driving cars
as well as to improve the quality of results on google maps and again ai's
got really good at solving these puzzles so the folks behind captcha have been
making them progressively harder much to the chagrin of you the average internet
user who's just trying to bulk by toilet paper online instead of schlepping up to
walmart but is there an end in sight to this arms race the way those i'm not a
robot boxes work without forcing you to solve a puzzle is by tracking your
in-browser behavior how fast you type how you move your mouse around even the
way you switch tabs to determine that you're human and not a bot that can
input paragraphs of text in a matter of seconds or move a mouse to precisely a
single pixel location on the screen some engineers believe what we'll end up
having is a kind of souped-up version of this it's no secret that you're
constantly being tracked in some form or another while you're online so future
versions of captcha may not only track the way you type remove your mouse but
also keep tabs on you more thoroughly through cookies and browser activity to
determine whether or not you're human such a capture would basically always be
running in the background on a browser level so while it might
help us beat the bots there are obvious privacy concerns in addition to the fact
that bots might end up beating these tests at some point in the future as
well i just hope it doesn't get to the point where all computers come with a
usb connected dna sample collectors so thanks for watching guys if you like
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