No more wiggly words and annoying fuzzy pictures! Google develops a Captcha that only asks you to tick a box
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For anyone tired of squinting at distorted words and images when trying to leave a comment on a website, buy tickets for a gig, or register for social media sites, Google has a solution.
The internet search giant is developing a new form of Captcha to be used across the web to filter real users from automated bots.
Software engineers at the firm have developed a new type of program that identifies you purely by letting you tick a box.
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Google's new No Captcha service will ask users if they are a robot and occasionally ask them to match images to a clue rather than trying to decipher distorted text or find words hidden within an image
So rather than finding they have filled in a long online form only to have their submission rejected because the words at the bottom are illegible, users will be able to confirm they are human with a simple click of a mouse.
The new program is an upgrade to Google's existing reCaptcha service, which it is calling No Captcha reCaptcha.
In a post on Google's security blog, Vinay Shet, product manager for reCaptcha, said: 'reCaptcha protects the websites you love from spam and abuse.
'For years, we've prompted users to confirm they aren't robots by asking them to read distorted text and type it into a box.
'But, we figured it would be easier to just directly ask our users whether or not they are robots—so, we did!
We've begun rolling out a new API that radically simplifies the reCaptcha experience. We're calling it the "No Captcha reCaptcha".
'This new API (application programming interface) also lets us experiment with new types of challenges that are easier for us humans to use, particularly on mobile devices.
Google's reCaptcha service is also used to help digitise books and annotate images, but the search giant is now preparing to release a new version of the program that uses a simple tick box. Many users find the images and words produced by the current software impossible to read, leading to errors
Google is testing the new service on a few selected sites, but said it is expecting to roll it out to all sites in 2015.
In some cases, users will still be asked to perform a secondary test to confirm they are human.
Mr Shet said that this could take the form of choosing images that match a clue.
He said: 'It's much easier to tap photos of cats or turkeys than to tediously type a line of distorted text on your phone.'
The term Captcha was first coined in 2000 by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University.
It stands for Completely Automated Public Turing Test To Tell Computers and Humans Apart.
The concept is to generate tests that humans can solve but current computer programs cannot and so protect websites from automated bots that might seek to use them for spam.
For example, humans can read distorted text or numbers in a picture, but computers cannot. Some also use clips of audio to make the task even harder.
However, these programs often repeatedly generate text that is so unreadable that humans cannot decipher them either while others use rather bizarre approaches.
These have prompted spoof books and cartoons that mock the phrases and images these programs often generate.
Google's reCaptcha service, however, says that when humans solve its puzzles, these help digitise text, annotate images and create data that can be used to preserve books and improve maps.
Google's current service analyses a range of behaviours along with asking users to decipher distorted text
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