W3C has had it with CAPTCHA
You’ve probably heard of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C); it’s is an “international consortium where member organizations, a full-time staff, and the public work together to develop Web standards.
According to their web site, their mission is:
“To lead the World Wide Web to its full potential by developing protocols and guidelines that ensure long-term growth for the Web.”
Well, lately they have been working hard to lead the web away from CAPTCHA, and with good reason. According to this article on their web site, CAPTCHA is giving webmasters a “false sense of security.”
The recently published their findings on CAPTCHA which indicate that automated spam-bots can defeat CAPTCHA protection with between “88% and 100% accuracy.”
So they came up with something like 10 alternatives and guess what the #1 solution was? Logic puzzles. So here you have the W3C, with some of the greatest Internet-focused minds available, declaring the death of CAPTCHA and recommending that webmasters consider using “simple mathematical word puzzles, trivia, and the like to raise the bar for robots, at least to the point where using them is more attractive elsewhere.”
Hey, I must be one of the greatest Internet-focused minds myself, because that’s what I’ve been trying to tell everyone for as long as I can remember.
If you want to beat the spam-bots at their own game, all you have to do is throw some text at them that they can’t possibly understand but that humans can blow through in a second.
And that’s what Advanced Textual Confirmation does. Take a look at the full article. Sure, you’ll see other recommendations such as Heuristic checks and Federated identity systems and public-key infrastructure solutions, but you won’t find a solution that’s as easy to integrate as Advanced Textual Confirmation, that’s for sure.