reCAPTCHA Hell

What is a Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart?

Well, we have all come across these puzzles on the internet that you need to solve in order to access some site, some service or download. Created to protect again spam and bots, one can image a good use in principle. Well, you sense a but coming up, right?

But then you reach that site that asks you to solve a puzzle that is "easy for people" yet somehow you never manage to do so. Well that impossible solution has a name:

reCAPTCHA

While I have kinda made my peace with Google’s ubiquity as I’m writing these lines using Google Chrome and publishing this article on Blogger, here is the case where this monopoly got cumbersome. Here we have an API that simply is effectively blocking legitimate user from using the service provided by the website using said API - eventually driving them away. I all but stopped using any webpage using reCAPTCHA as I’m losing (at best) a lot of time solving or (at worst) not solving it. I wonder how many others like me started to avoid these reCAPTCHAs while looking for other, more viable service providers.

And I wish more people would start boycotting any website usings these impossible to solve tests. Even the name Turing test is a misnomer because Alan Turing imagined a test where a human can test it’s communication partner. I doubt that an machine-created test will be ever sophisticated enough so a machine could not solve it. If a machine is capable to create the test and understand the responses a machine can also solve the test. reCAPTCHA kinda proves this point by creating a test that neither man nor machine can solve.