14 DAY TRIAL // Google has released a new version of the annoying captchas you've seen around the web. This new version, Google says, loses one of its main characteristics: it's no longer annoying.
In fact, the new captchas are laughably easy to solve, just some easy to read numbers. No one should have any trouble figuring out what the squiggly lines say anymore.
That sounds great for us humans who just want to get to the site we need, but there's a reason why captchas were hard to read in the first place, namely to make it harder for computers to break them.
Google says it's got that figured. From now on, humans will get simple captchas, while bots will get really difficult ones.
Understandably, the company doesn't say much about how it figures out who's a human and who's a computer to know to serve them different captchas.
It also doesn't say why it needs captchas anyway, if it can figure out who's a human and who's not without them.
"The reCAPTCHA team has been performing extensive research and making steady improvements to learn how to better protect users from attackers. As a result, reCAPTCHA is now more adaptive and better-equipped to distinguish legitimate users from automated software," Google explains.
"The updated system uses advanced risk analysis techniques, actively considering the user’s entire engagement with the CAPTCHA—before, during and after they interact with it," it adds.
"That means that today the distorted letters serve less as a test of humanity and more as a medium of engagement to elicit a broad range of cues that characterize humans and bots," Google says.
You should start seeing the new captcha system in action soon enough. It remains to be seen whether the new process is better at keeping out bots, like Google says it is.