An annoyance, an important security feature, an awkward existential request: no matter how much you feel being asked to prove that you are not a robot, it has become a daily occurrence for most of us, but we may not find ourselves in missing.
A new feature of the upcoming versions of iOS and macOS, Apple’s operating systems for iPhones and computers, promises to boot the “captchas” once and for all. Called “automatic verification,” technology will allow sites to verify that you’re not a robot without having to do anything.
Captchas, that is, “Fully automated public Turing test to differentiate between computers and humans,” are the little tests you sometimes see when you sign up for a website to help stop fraud.
You may be asked to detect all the traffic lights in an image or to type in some letters and numbers that seem swaying. If you’re wrong, you might be asked to start over, and you’ll wonder if you really know what a traffic light is like, or if after all you might be a robot.
“You probably don’t like being interrupted,” said Tommy Pauly of Apple. “Certainly not. The reason these experiences exist is to prevent fraudulent activity. If you run a server, you don’t want it to be overwhelmed by fraud. Some attempts to create accounts or buy products come from legitimate users. But other attempts may be attackers or robots “.
The company worked with Fastly and Cloudflare, two companies that operate the infrastructure level of much of the public Internet, to create the feature. It’s based on the same technology that underpins Apple’s efforts to replace passwords on the Internet and works by allowing your device to send an encrypted statement confirming that it’s being used by a human on the requesting website.
Although the service is linked to Apple’s iCloud network, the requesting site will not receive any personal information about the user or their device.
While Apple is the first to drive this technology to the users themselves, the basic idea has been used by Google, which helped develop the standard and built a system similar to Chrome. But the Google version has so far focused on letting third parties create their own Captcha replacements, rather than running out of technology.
In fact, Google may even lose the change: Since the company bought a startup called reCAPTCHA in 2009, it has used the human input of testing as part of its training data for large projects. machine learning, first asking people to help you. transcribe scanned books and then use the answers to train their artificial vision systems on road features in order to perfect their autonomous car projects.