How Web Developers try to combat bot traffic on websites using Captcha technology
Episode #9-34 released on April 7, 2019
We all know that Captchas are annoying and very commonly hard to read for us humans. In fact, they are so notoriously hard to read that I even wrote a form of Limited Artificial Intelligence for my email processors on this very web-site and for this very show because of a viewer was unable to use the contact form because of restrictions related to sight and using the audio version is not a viable option either.
Now, historically, Captchas weren't hard for humans to read, only bots online had difficulty with them, but something that came into existence years before I was born was reapplied to the Internet. That technology that was repurposed to deal with Captchas is called OCR, or Optical Character Recognition.
OCR is used for character recognition and allows people with vision problems to know what is on the screen, it allows us to scan hard copy documents on paper and import them into computers as text, and so much more. The issue is that it is, also, used by malicious groups to flood web-sites with messages and create unauthentic accounts on web-sites for purposes of spamming, infecting other computers, fraud, etc. And, this is why many websites have Captchas in the first place, but the OCR technology is being used against it, meaning that website owners are forced to use harder and harder to read captcha technology or opt for image identification, something computers have already been able to do. Even your iPhone, Android or other device has a text-based search for items in your pictures that isn't that bad. Heck, this very ability had led to some outrange when some noticed that you can look up the word bra and find every photograph in a phone where a bra was present.
And, along those lines, you may have noticed that many websites require you click in a link in your email to prove your own the account to be allowed to create a verified account, and yet that has been beaten, as well.
Host : Steve Smith | Music : | Editor : Steve Smith | Producer : Zed Axis Dot Net