Do the best you can until you know better. Then when you know better, do better. – Maya Angelou

Mr. Walker's Classroom Blog

Google Can Now Tell You’re Not a Robot With Just One Click

This is on the topic I discussed today in some of my classes, the movie “The Imitation Game” and the resulting end-of-movie scene [SPOILER ALERT] where Benedict Cumberbatch playing Alan Turing {great link} asks if he is a person or a machine.

google-captcha

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When Alan Turing first conceived of the Turing Test in 1947, he suggested that a computer program’s resemblance to a human mind could be gauged by making it answer a series of questions written by an interrogator in another room. Jump forward about seven decades, and Google says it’s now developed a Turing Test that can spot a bot by requiring it to do something far simpler: Click on a checkbox.

The new reCAPTCHA is here. A significant number of your users can now attest they are human without having to solve a CAPTCHA. Instead with just a single click they’ll confirm they are not a robot. We’re calling it the No CAPTCHA reCAPTCHA experience. See blog for more details.

reCAPTCHA protects the websites you love from spam and abuse. So, when you go online—say, for some last-minute holiday shopping—you won’t be competing with robots and abusive scripts to access sites. 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, like this:

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” and this is how it looks:

On websites using this new API, a significant number of users will be able to securely and easily verify they’re human without actually having to solve a CAPTCHA. Instead, with just a single click, they’ll confirm they are not a robot.