Annoyance, an important security feature, an awkward existential request: no matter how much you feel asked to prove that you are not a robot, this has become a daily occurrence for most of us, but we may not miss it.
A new feature in upcoming versions of iOS and macOS, Apple’s iPhone and PC operating systems, promises to load captchas once and for all. Called “automatic verification”, the technology will allow sites to confirm that you are not a robot without having to do anything.
Captchas – a “fully automated Turing public test to distinguish between computers and humans” – are the little tests you sometimes see when you sign up for a website to help stop fraud.
He may ask you to notice all the traffic lights in a photo or write some unstable letters and numbers. If you make a mistake, he may ask you to start again, which will make you wonder if you really know what a traffic light looks like – or if you can still be a robot.
“You’re probably not happy to be interrupted,” said Tommy Polly of Apple. “It simply came to our notice then. The reason for the existence of these experiences is to prevent fraudulent activity. If you run a server, you don’t want it to be overwhelmed by fraud. Some attempts to create accounts or purchase products come from legitimate users. But other attempts may be from attackers or bots. “
The company is working with Fastly and Cloudflare, two companies that manage the infrastructure level of much of the public Internet to build the feature. It relies on the same kind of technology that underpins Apple’s efforts to replace passwords on the Internet, and it works by allowing your device to send an encrypted statement confirming that it is being used by a human to the requesting website.
Although the service is connected to Apple’s iCloud network, the requested site will not receive any personal information about the user or his device.
While Apple was the first to introduce such technology to consumers themselves, the main idea was used by Google, which helped develop the standard and embed a similar system in Chrome. But Google’s version so far has focused on allowing third parties to build their own Captcha replacements instead of shutting down the technology altogether.
In fact, Google may even lose out on the change: since the company bought a startup called reCAPTCHA in 2009, it has been using human input from testing as part of its training data for major machine learning projects, first asking people to help transcribe it. scanned books and later used the answers to train his machine vision systems on road characteristics to refine his self-driving car projects.
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