Are You a Human replaces annoying CAPTCHAs with games

Websites need to verify that a visitor is a real person and not an automated bot. But theCAPTCHA test that they came up with — where you have to type in the word that you see in a blurry distorted font image — is extremely annoying and often leads to multiple failures.

So a Detroit-based startup, Are You a Human, is replacing the CAPTCHA with simple minigames instead. It is releasing its human authentication tool, PlayThru, to help companies fight spammers and bots that have begun to circumvent CAPTCHAs. Companies using it include Quicken Loans and Fat Head, and users have played nearly 2 million games to date.

The term CAPTCHA was coined in 2000 by Carnegie Mellon University researchers who based it on the word “capture” and used it to as an acronym for Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart. The security tests have been used on sites that require users to sign up for an account, buy tickets, participate in online polls, or post comments. But since that time, hackers have figured out how to bypass the security test by re-using the session identification of a known test image.

On top of that, CAPTCHAs are frustrating to users who can’t discern the distorted text.About 20 percent of the users will leave a site rather than complete a CAPTCHA, according to the company’s research.

Read more about this new creation here: http://venturebeat.com/2012/05/21/are-you-a-human-replaces-annoying-captchas-with-games/