14 DAY TRIAL // Captchas are a fact of life online and few people have never encountered one on the web and, of those that have, few haven’t been frustrated by one at some point. Unfortunately, they do serve a purpose and many sites have been forced to implement such a system to keep out spammers and others up to no good. NuCaptcha is aiming to fix some of the issues with the current captcha systems with an interesting approach: video captchas.
“NuCaptcha introduces video technology to text-based Captchas: Animation enables NuCaptcha to increase security features such as closely packing letters together; creating text that is very difficult for software, specifically Optical Character Recognition (OCR), to solve compared to current products in the field. In contrast, the animation makes the captcha far easier for humans to solve, because humans are attuned to perceiving motion,” the official announcement read.
The most common type of captchas, which stands for Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart, are text-based ones which require users to input one or more words displayed in a way as to make it hard for computers to read. These have been around for a decade, but hackers and spammers have become quite adept at breaking them. What’s more, they have also started to employ cheap labour to solve the captchas by hand, so, from a security stand point, captchas are not as safe as they once were.
At the same time, they can be very frustrating for users as they can prove quite difficult to solve. NuCaptcha fights against all of these issues. The company says the video captchas are trivial for humans to solve, despite the movement of the letters, but computers have a very tough time. And NuCaptcha also safeguards against paid human solvers. When the system detects that a person may be trying to abuse the system it slows down the videos so much it makes them not worth the while to transcribe.
NuCaptcha for WordPress is available for download here.
NuCaptcha for PHP is available for download here.
NuCaptcha for .NET is available for download here.