Google has announced today that it has launched a new system to differentiate between humans and bots which is way less annoying than CAPTCHA and more intuitive. Say hello to reCAPTCHA!

Google CAPTCHA's deathbed nearing...

CAPTCHA was designed back in 1997 to keep the bots away. It is a seemingly nonsensical string of letters and numbers which a user has to fill in to confirm that s/he is indeed a human. While this was an state-of-the-art security protocol back in time, the CAPTCHA system has surely annoyed users a lot with the complex designs and presentation of the letters. Taking advantages of new algorithms, it has been long possible to get away with CAPTCHA and introduce more human-friendly techniques.

While there may be many, Google is introducing a new security system that will track a user's behavior with machine to ensure that a human is trying to enter a service or a site. Factors like your IP address and your mouse movement speeds can be some of the deciding parameters here. How would this be tracked? Well Google prefers having you to go through a one-click system than a complex string of gibberish words. By presenting an I AM NOT A BOT checkbox, it will measure the mouse movement when you click on that box. If your speed is humanly, you won't have to go through anything else. Bots (and some 20% of the human tries too), however, will still face the captchas.

Now coming on to the mobile devices, Google still doesn't have a one-click security check post. On mobile devices, Google will show you different images for comparison. You will be asked to select similar images from the array presented to you. Considering images are still hard for bots, they would do the job. Google reports that WordPress, Snapchat and a few others have already adopted this new security protocol.

An important point to consider here is the tracking capability of Google. Google is one of world's top technology companies which are now infamous of knowing too much about their users having no respect for user privacy. However, Vinay Shet of Google's Captcha team confirms that Google will be able to ONLY track your movements inside the captcha widget and not the entire screen. Well, let's hope so and rejoice the possibility of getting rid of Google captcha - eventually.

- Source: Wired