How "I'm not a Robot" checkboxes work

Originally published at: http://boingboing.net/2017/02/07/how-im-not-a-robot-check.html

7 Likes

I don’t see a link to the source?

You mean the embedded Youtube video?

ETA: Perhaps a link ?

1 Like

Sorry, this is the modern web where text has been replaced with video. Text can be copied and pasted and shared, thereby diverting eyeballs from where the advertisers want them.

Reading stuff is so Obama-era. Get with the program, Comrade!

33 Likes

There is irony in a gratuitously audiovisual video on captchas pointing out the difficulty that captchas created for the visually impaired having no self-awareness of videos posing a similar difficultly.

18 Likes

I think it was author Matt Forbeck who proposed the notion that the “I am not a robot” checkboxes are the robots secretly compiling a list.

29 Likes

This is why I prefer written articles to video. Skip to 4 minutes to find the information you came here for. The rest of it is The History of Captchas.

13 Likes

I hope they are vigilant for false negatives.

10 Likes

I’ve refereed to this phenomenon for years now as “The Video-ificatation of the Internet” but for some odd reason the name just doesn’t seem to have caught on.

7 Likes

I would like to know the history of CAPTCHAs.

I like, TV;DW. Too Video; Didn’t Watch.

35 Likes

I love it!

Makes me think of how much I hate the fact that my youtube app on my Samsung Galaxy tablet won’t allow me to speed them up.

4 Likes

I recommend making a video to get the word out there.

10 Likes

Yes. I’d be casually interested enough to read an article - text, perhaps with images - but not sufficiently interested to watch a video.

If anything, it piques my interest enough to send me to Google for text-based coverage, but that doesn’t assist the video’s maker, who, so far as I’m concerned, has utterly wasted his/her time.

9 Likes

Well to be fair, his video is not likely to become the dominant anti-spam measure on websites anytime soon to stymie the visually impaired, either. :wink:

4 Likes

Yeah, I’m going to sit through the first four rambling minutes of a five-minute video just to get to a perfunctory and misleading answer delivered in YouTube Voice ™.

2 Likes

That last bit has me worried because I can never identify the storefronts, and it always asks me. Does that mean I’m a subroutine?

5 Likes

There’s something ironic about my having to read that twice to understand it.

6 Likes

You’re doing it wrong.

:joy:

4 Likes

Not just a sub-routine, but a bad sub-routine who should be punished - assume the position! :smiling_imp:

5 Likes