Are you even a human? This is the existential question we all get asked on a daily basis from the likes of Google, Instagram, TikTok and other tech companies that frankly are in no position to question our humanity.

That's right, today's topic is CAPTCHA. Will you be able to decipher the words we say as they are scrambled into a wavy multicoloured mess? Perhaps you can identify which central American country CAPTCHA is being used in to fight crime? Or will you just download tons of pornography and rage against the machine?

All these questions and more will be given a great big green check mark on this week's episode of Seemingly Unrelated!

Footnotes:

Burgess, Matt. ‘Captcha Is Dying. This Is How It’s Being Reinvented for the AI Age’. Wired. Accessed 28 October 2024. https://www.wired.com/story/captcha-automation-broken-history-fix/.

Gault, Matthew. ‘Captcha Is Asking Users to Identify Objects That Don’t Exist’. VICE (blog), 24 May 2023. https://www.vice.com/en/article/captcha-is-asking-users-to-identify-objects-that-dont-exist/.

Gugliotta, Guy. ‘Deciphering Old Texts, One Woozy, Curvy Word at a Time’. The New York Times, 28 March 2011, sec. Science. https://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/29/science/29recaptcha.html.

Ovide, Shira. ‘Tired of Proving You’re Not a Robot? Say Goodbye to Captcha Boxes.’ Washington Post, 25 July 2023. https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/07/25/captchas-hate-privacy-pass/.

‘The Future of CAPTCHAs’. Accessed 28 October 2024. https://anti-captcha.com/apidoc/articles/the-future-of-captchas.

Krzyworzeka, Natalia, Lidia Ogiela, and Marek R Ogiela. “Cognitive CAPTCHA Password Reminder.” Sensors (Basel, Switzerland) 23, no. 6 (2023): 3170-.

Kumar, Mohinder, M. K. Jindal, and Munish Kumar. “An Efficient Technique for Breaking of Coloured Hindi CAPTCHA.” Soft computing (Berlin, Germany) 27, no. 16 (2023): 11661–11686.

Metz, Rachel. AI Startup Says It Has Defeated Captchas. Technology Review (1998). Vol. 117. Cambridge: Technology Review, Inc, 2014.

“Humans + Porn = Solved Captcha.” Network security 2007, no. 11 (2007): 2–2.

https://gizmodo.com/gpt4-open-ai-chatbot-task-rabbit-chatgpt-1850227471

Alnfiai, Mrim, and Fawaz Alassery. “TapCAPTCHA: Non-Visual CAPTCHA on Touchscreens for Visually Impaired People.” Journal on Multimodal User Interfaces 16, no. 4 (2022): 385–398.

Shi, Chenghui, Xiaogang Xu, Shouling Ji, Kai Bu, Jianhai Chen, Raheem Beyah, and Ting Wang. “Adversarial CAPTCHAs.” IEEE transactions on cybernetics 52, no. 7 (2022): 1–14.

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