Interesting articles about reCAPTCHA.
- How much time and money did we lose using reCAPTCHA?
Are you a robot?
Over the years, to help prove that we aren’t computers while reducing spam, Humanity toiled to make sense of jumbled letters and numbers and pick images of buses, traffic lights, motorcycles, and bridges.
However, in the ever-escalating cybersecurity game of cat and mouse, the bad guys inevitably learned how to thwart our protective efforts. By the end of 2024, research had shown that bots had figured out how to beat reCAPTCHA (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart) 100% of the time.
Now that we’ve conceded defeat to our robot overlords — at least for earlier versions of reCAPTCHA — have you ever wondered how much time we spent on these no-longer-useful tests? The study, Dazed & Confused: A Large-Scale Real-World User Study of reCAPTCHAv2 quantifies how the amount of time and resources we’ve lost over the years.
According to the report:
There have been at least 512 billion reCAPTCHAv2 sessions, taking 819 million hours, which translates into at least $6.1 billion USD in free wages. Traffic resulting from reCAPTCHAv2 consumed 134 Petabytes of bandwidth, which translates into about 7.5 million kWhs of energy, corresponding to 7.5 million pounds of CO2 pollution.
Note that the study calculates the monetary impact of wasted time by multiplying 819 million hours of labor by the minimum U.S. hourly wage of $7.50 to get $6.1B. If we were to use the current U.S. median hourly wage of approximately $35 per hour (the median salary for network support technicians was $34.39 hourly in 2023) that figure jumps to around $28.7B.
https://community.spiceworks.com/t/how-much-time-and-money-did-we-lose-using-recaptcha/1173077
2) About AI and reCAPTCHA
https://www.zdnet.com/article/ai-can-now-solve-recaptcha-tests-as-accurately-as-you-can/
3) The history of reCAPTCHA and how it works today, check out this great video from the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.
4) Did you know there’s a Doom-themed version of CAPTCHA that forces you to defeat 3 enemies before you can access a website? https://mashable.com/article/doom-themed-captcha-real-how-to-try-it-now
