Catpcha spam guards can be annoying for users, but Google has revealed an improved version that can tell you’re not a robot with a single click.
Google currently fights spam bots with Re-captcha, a free service for webmasters which requires users to enter (distorted) text shown in an image.
On the Recaptcha website the company now states, “Life’s too short to spend solving distorted text. Coming soon, the’ No-CAPTCHA’ reCAPTCHA”.
Although No-Captcha has not been officially released, the below animated image shows what it looks like.
No more typing in distorted words or numbers; Google says it can, in many cases, tell the difference between a person or an automated program simply by tracking clues that don’t involve any user interaction.
The giveaways that separate man and machine can be as subtle as how he or she (or it) moves a mouse in the moments before that single click.
“For most users, this dramatically simplifies the experience,” says Vinay Shet, the product manager for Google’s Captcha team. “They basically get a free pass. You can solve the catptcha without having to solve it.”
“All of this gives us a model of how a human behaves,” says Shet. “It’s a whole bag of cues that make this hard to spoof for a bot.” He adds that Google also will use other variables that it is keeping secret—revealing them, he says, would help botmasters improve their software and undermine Google’s filters.
For smartphone and tablet users, Google hasn’t simplified its captcha to a single click (see image below)
