Captchas Are Getting Harder

Captchas that aim to distinguish humans from nefarious bots are demanding more brain power. WSJ: The companies and cybersecurity experts who design Captchas have been doing all they can to stay one step ahead of the bad actors figuring out how to crack them. A cottage industry of third-party Captcha-solving firms -- essentially, humans hired to solve the puzzles all day -- has emerged. More alarmingly, so has technology that can automatically solve the more rudimentary tests, such as identifying photos of motorcycles and reading distorted text. 'Software has gotten really good at labeling photos,' said Kevin Gosschalk, the founder and CEO of Arkose Labs, which designs what it calls 'fraud and abuse prevention solutions,' including Captchas. 'So now enters a new era of Captcha -- logic based.'

That shift explains why Captchas have started to both annoy and perplex. Users no longer have to simply identify things. They need to identify things and do something with that information -- move a puzzle piece, rotate an object, find the specter of a number hidden in a roomscape. Compounding this bewilderment is the addition to the mix of generative AI images, which creates new objects difficult for robots to identify but baffles humans who just want to log in. 'Things are going to get even stranger, to be honest, because now you have to do something that's nonsensical,' Gosschalk said. 'Otherwise, large multimodal models will be able to understand.'

Read more of this story at Slashdot.