A New Form of CAPTCHA is About to Emerge?

     Over the recent years, since the number of internet users have begun to rapidly increase, website security companies and technology companies have been trying to formulate a way to introduce a new CAPTCHA one that doesn't require the user to guess which photos have a stop sign or which let is crossed out. Recently Google has introduced a CAPTCHA requiring no test at all, well, not exactly a physical one, rather one that runs in the background as you're scouring the web buying clothes. Once users found out about this new CAPTCHA it wasn't exactly all rainbows and sunshine, users particularly did not enjoy the fact that some big-name company has managed to further invade their privacy online as if tailored ads weren't already enough. From there it was back to the drawing board.

    This cycle of CAPTCHAs introduced a competition between internet companies, one that would make one winner with the best Turing test come out on top. The only problem was because Google owned the rights to CAPTCHA the name and the tests, after having bought it, no company could do what Google was making. That was until, a well-known website security company which users might infamously know for the annoying 401 error page of the website being down: Cloudflare. The purpose of this company and why websites use this company's security services is sort of in the same way one would use CAPTCHAs, to protect against hackers and bot attacks also known as DDoS. 

The company has just announced their own form of CAPTCHA which they have named "Cryptographic Attestation of Personhood" (CAP), where the test is given to the user which generates a key, this in the meantime, gets sent to the security company where they determine whether the user is a bot or not. And of course, the internet being the internet, one software engineer immediately set out to show the world just how dumb CloudFare's alternative idea was. By the end, after a brutal showdown between an individual and company, there ended being no clear winner, as the engineer managed to cheapy create a whole new machine just to tackle the CAPTCHA alternative, while the company adamantly defends their new program against the engineer's claims. Nothing is for certain yet for the company and they still have a ways to go until the program can truly be introduced on the internet.