The other is to hire humans to solve tasks designed to be solved by humans.ĬAPTCHA farms have been around for over a decade, pretty much since CAPTCHAs first became a way to protect against bots. One is to seek out or even build a bot that is capable of solving these CAPTCHAs, continuing the ongoing arms race. If you are a bot operator and are faced with the problem of small repetitive tasks getting in the way of making serious money, then you have a couple of choices.

Unfortunately, it’s a technology that’s under threat from a very old technology: outsourced manual labor. Even those bots that aren’t bad actors can cause problems when businesses use web analytics skewed by bots to make decisions.ĬAPTCHAs are the most visible technique used by online businesses to differentiate between real customers and bots. Not every bot that visits a website is there to cause trouble, but many are-scraping the content, trying to buy limited-edition goods before genuine customers can, or using card gateways to check if stolen credit card details are still valid. With over half of web traffic automated, it’s increasingly important for businesses to tell which of their online visitors are real and which are bots. Squint and retype these increasingly indecipherable letters (“Is that a lowercase H or a lowercase B?”). Please prove that you’re not a bot: select all the photos that show traffic lights.

Shopping or booking an appointment online can seem increasingly like busywork.

Bot solving captcha