Cloudflare CAPTCHA replacement missing crosswalks, checkboxes, Google

Cloudflare recently made a bold statement: We could all do better things in our lives than decide which images contain crosswalks or stoplights, or tick the “I’m not a robot”box. The cloud service company is now offering a free CAPTCHA alternative, Turnstile, available to anyone whether they’re a Cloudflare customer or not, highlighting Google’s role in the current “prove you’re human”hegemony.

Turnstile uses Cloudflare’s Managed Challenge system, which considers user behavior, browser data, and, on Apple devices, private access tokens, to distinguish human visitors from bots and scripts. Cloudflare claims that its Managed Challenge system was able to reduce by 91 percent the number of CAPTCHAs shown to its customers’ visitors during the year.

The turnstile integration fires “a series of small, non-interactive JavaScript calls”to explore the visitor, including job and space validation, web API lookups, and “various other calls to detect browser quirks and human behavior,”Cloudflare said in a post. Tasks vary by visitor, and machine learning can update the model based on the general characteristics of visitors who have previously passed the test. The user only sees the “Confirmation…”widget for a moment, and then “Success!”

heavily controlled by Google security researchers seem to have figured out

“Google says it doesn’t use this information to target ads, but at the end of the day, Google is an ad selling company,”Cloudflare said in a statement.

Google bought reCAPTCHA in 2009 and used it early on for tasks like digitizing books, street view house numbers, and, as you probably guessed, identifying things like stairs, palm trees, taxis, and the like, in image recognition tools. Cloudflare notes that CAPTCHA’s ubiquity is one of its strengths, as it has a stable, constantly updated database of decisions and behaviors to build on.

Google reCAPTCHA has been offering a “stealth “mode in version 2 since 2017 and in version 3 that will “never bother your users “. Most internet users still see their fair share of photo selection grids and anti-robot flags, likely due to sites and developers not updating to newer versions or potentially appearing “suspicious”to an unknown algorithm.

Cloudflare, originally a content delivery network that has evolved into security, hosting, and just about every other aspect of cloud computing, cites its mission of “helping build a better internet”as the reason it’s giving away a free verification service. The company, whose reverse proxy services are used by about 20 percent of all sites, was recently in the news for its lengthy debate over abandoning hate-mongering site Kiwi Farms and choosing not to leave Russia after it invaded Ukraine.