In order to make it much more difficult for spammers and bots to decipher CAPTCHA codes, Yahoo is working on a technology that will replace the current CAPTCHA with a technique whereby characters are superimposed on streaming videos or animations. These codes shall also come with a timer in order to validate the presence of a human.
In a patent published at the US Patent and Trademark Office, Yahoo has revealed a technology that will do just this. The inventor of the patent, Scott Preece writes
“A server may compose a streaming captcha by superimposing a captcha character string on a video. A timer may be set and the streaming captcha may be streamed to the client device. The streaming captcha may be displayed on the client device, and a character string input by a user may be received in response to display of the streaming captcha.”
“For instance, a streaming captcha may be composed by superimposing a captcha character string on a video stream so that the character string appears in the foreground part of the video stream. In an embodiment, the background part of the video stream may vary. Moreover, a character may change progressively into the next character in the sequence of characters in the captcha character string. Or an animation may be generated to display the sequence of characters from the captcha character string.”
It is an interesting technique that can possibly reduce the spam count at least for sometime to come; until the spammers find a way out of this again. But one concern is with countries where high bandwidth broadband is yet to take root. In such places, video streaming CAPTCHAs can highly bring down user experience. What do you think?