Our evil robotic overlords have taken over!
Well, not, that's not really what's going on, but Google is replacing the reCAPTCHA tech used in a lot of places (including my blogs) with tech that detects how you move your mouse, etc., when you click on a box that says "I am not a robot."
I always liked that the old reCAPTCHA was used to help identify both old book text and street numbers for Google Maps — doing something for the community. But given that hackers have figured out ways to puzzle even those images out in order to get past reCAPTCHA, then Google can crack them, too, and move on to some other means of human identification.
(If I were particularly fiendish, I'd say, "Hmmm, maybe outsourcing cracking that text reading to hackers was their actual plan all along." In which case, maybe we should figure out some other conundrums to get them to work on.)
No More Word Puzzles: Google Can Tell You’re Human With One Click
Google’s new reCAPTCHA security software gets rid of complicated word puzzles and uses a simple checkbox to confirm whether a user is a human or a bot.
"…was their actual plan all along."
I like the deep game you're playing here Dave, but we need to follow the fractal just a bit further. What is really being hacked here is us. We all like to think we're soulful little snowflakes imbued with free will, but in reality we are just bio-machines with a handful of manufacturing errors and when they finish cracking our programming code, it's game over.
Case in point: Elf on the Shelf
I had never heard of "Elf on the Shelf".
Argh.
It's not a tradition, it's a product! Wake Up, Sheeple!
*also, marketing to children is immoral.
+Barrett McCarstle Yes. Though, in a long-term perspective, a lot of "beloved traditions" started as "shameless promotions." As they say, it's only kinky (or irritatingly commercial) the first time.
I concur about marketing to children, but it's hardly a new thing. That's a problem largely because of parents, who should be the primary gatekeepers but too often cave in on children responding to marketing.
That's what's going through my head as I prepare to buy the third, yes third, Elf because that little bastard keeps disappearing during the off-season.
Sorry for hijacking your post BTW. 😉
@Barrett McCarstle
Check your refrigerator. My daughter sent me a poster this morning (which unfortunately, I didn’t save) that showed The Elf in the fridge where he had given all the food products googly eyes. Creepy. We never had an Elf.
Some store that Stan and I were at had Mensch on the Bench for sale, cause we wouldn’t want to leave someone out. (Except the Muslims cause they’d just get mad about it.)
-ducks as people start throwing things.