On the Internet, probably everyone is a classic “Are you a robot?” It has encountered and passed the CAPTCHA test. In “Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart,” or CAPTCHAs, users are given a task that distinguishes them from robots. These tasks range from annoyingly long (like select all images with traffic lights) to ones that require you to do almost nothing (like click here to verify you’re not a robot). You may have questioned how logical these “please click” tasks specifically make because of their simplicity. Are robots (or bots) too clumsy to click on a box?
Are bots that incompetent?
The short answer to this question is simply “no, they’re not that clumsy.” A rerun video from the British TV panel show QI explains that the test actually examines your behavior before you press the button. While bots that can press this button have been developed, they have a hard time mimicking the behavior of normal people before they click.
According to cybersecurity firm Cloudflare, the test tracks the movement of the user’s cursor as it moves towards the box.
“Even the most direct movement of a human has some microscopic level of randomness: tiny unconscious movements that bots can’t easily imitate. If the movement of the cursor contains some of this unpredictability, the tester decides that the user is probably legitimate.” The statement continues: “reCAPTCHA can also evaluate the cookies and device history stored by the browser on a user’s device to see if the user is likely to be a bot.”
Cookies and your recent history can tell the computer whether you are a human or a robot. QI presenter Sandi Toksvig said in the video, “For example, before ticking the box, let’s say you watched a few cat videos, liked a tweet about Greta Thunberg, then checked your Gmail account before starting work; all this makes them think you have to be a human,” he says. “In fact, when you click ‘I’m not a robot’, you instruct the site to look at your data and make decisions for itself.”
Usually the test is enough to convince the program that you are human, but sometimes it can give you alternative captchas, for example to see if your mouse movement is a little too sensitive or if your browsing history is that of a robot.
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