New Scientist: “Bots are better at beating ‘are you a robot?’ tests than humans are”

Bots are better and faster than humans at online CAPTCHA tests designed to keep them out of websites. The finding calls into question whether we should continue using these kind of security measures, given how much frustration they can cause for people. …

Gene Tsudik at the University of California, Irvine, and his colleagues have shown that bots have little problem solving the current crop of tests faster than humans, and suggest the tests are more trouble than they are worth.

“We do know for sure that they [the tests] are very much unloved. We didn’t have to do a study to come to that conclusion,” he says. “But people don’t know whether that effort, that colossal global effort that is invested into solving CAPTCHAs every day, every year, every month, whether that effort is actually worthwhile.”

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