CAPTCHA: a digital border between humans and bots Premium

CAPTCHA is a crucial security tool to verify human users and protect websites from bots, but faces challenges.

In the ever-changing world of Internet technology, keeping users safe and verifying their identities is important. One of the most important security systems for this is CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart). It’s like a puzzle that is easy for us to solve but hard for machines.

CAPTCHA was introduced in the early 2000s when the internet was flooded with automated bots. These bots made fake accounts, spammed websites, and stole data. Computer scientists Luis von Ahn, Manuel Blum, Nicholas J. Hopper, and John Langford wanted to create a system that could tell humans from machines, even as bots got smarter and more advanced.

In 2003, von Ahn and his team filed the first patent for CAPTCHA. Back then, users had to solve distorted text or characters that bots struggled to understand. These challenges often involved recognising letters, numbers, or symbols that were deliberately messed up so that machines couldn’t parse them but humans could.

CAPTCHA helps keep websites safe from automated attacks and makes online services more user-friendly. The challenge was simple, but its impact was huge. It stopped bots from getting into users’ sensitive data.

CAPTCHA is a clever way to tell if you’re a real person or a robot. It’s like a brainteaser that only humans can solve. Imagine you’re trying to figure out what’s written in a distorted picture. It’s tricky for computers, but it’s easy for us. Over time, CAPTCHA has gotten smarter and started to include other challenges to verify humans. Now, you might have to pick an image with a specific object in it, like a car or a traffic light. These challenges are even harder for computers/bots to solve.

CAPTCHA is based on an idea called the Turing test. This was proposed by British mathematician Alan Turing back in the 1950s. The idea was to create a test that could tell if a machine could act like a human. CAPTCHA does just that by making sure that tasks are easy for humans but hard for computers.

At first, CAPTCHA mostly used distorted text to check if a user is a real person. But as computers got better and bots became more advanced, CAPTCHA had to adapt. Now, it has a variety of different challenges to keep us safe.