to continue watching this video prove
you're a human by clicking on every box
that contain the lightest who are we
kidding we welcome all viewers organic
or robotic here at Tech quickie 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 there called
CAPTCHAs which stands for completely
automated public Turing test 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 leet-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 youth
that is still common to this day but
modern CAPTCHA didn't come around until
the late 1990s when the then popular
search engine Alta Vista panelled was
trying to find a way to prevent BOTS or
automated computer programs from adding
tons of spam and malicious URLs to their
linked 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 easy to read text Alta
vistas 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 CAPTCHA
continues to be quite popular along with
audio CAPTCHA for the visually impaired
that in a similar vein typically
includes spoken letters that are
somewhat garbled to defeat automated
sound analysis qy2
6w 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 CAPTCHAs more
frequently if you're using a VPN service
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
CAPTCHA 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 isn't
available to the bot through a backdoor
for example some CAPTCHA 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
CAPTCHAs so everything from image
recognition puzzles to trivia questions
have been employed to stay one step
ahead of the spam bot arms race but
Linus 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
couldn't a robot do that how does that
work well this is a pretty cool
mechanism from Google called no CAPTCHA
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 CAPTCHA
also looks at your IP address and Ricki
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 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 tunnel their
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going to tunnel bear comm slash Linus so
thanks for watching guys like dislike
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