TL;DR: A lifetime subscription to Pixilio is on sale for £30.94, saving you 88% on

When Occidental Petroleum Corp.’s Vicki Hollub introduced the idea of “net zero oil” two years ago, few outside

Bots are better and significantly faster than humans at cracking Captcha tests, according to a comprehensive new study that inspected the security system deployed in over 100 popular websites. Automated bots pose a significant threat to the internet because they can masquerade as legitimate human users and perform harmful operations like scraping content, creating accounts and posting fake comments or reviews, as well as consuming scarce resources. “If left unchecked, bots can perform these nefarious actions at scale,” warned scientists, including those from the University of California, Irvine. For over two decades, Captchas have been deployed as security checks by websites to block potentially harmful bots by presenting puzzles that are supposed to be straightforward for people to solve – but very difficult for computers. Earlier forms of Captcha, for instance, asked users to transcribe distorted text from an image, but with advances in computer vision and machine learning, bots soon caught up to recognise the text with near perfect accuracy. Engaged in an arms race with bots, Captchas have since evolved into an annoying presence on the internet, becoming increasingly more and more difficult to solve for both bots and humans. However, the new yet-to-be peer-reviewed research, posted in arXiv, finds bots are able to quickly crack Captcha tests with ease, suggesting global effort users put into cracking these puzzles every day may be more trouble than its worth. In the study, scientists assessed 200 of the most popular websites and found 120 still used Captcha. They took the help of 1,000 participants online from diverse backgrounds – varying in location, age, sex and educational level – to take 10 captcha tests on these sites and gauge their difficulty levels. Researchers found many bots described in scientific journals could beat humans at these tests in both speed and accuracy. Some captcha tests took human participants between nine and 15 seconds to solve, with an accuracy of about 50 to 84 per cent, while it took the bots less than a second to crack them, with up to near perfection. “The bots’ accuracy ranges from 85-100 per cent, with the majority above 96 per cent. This substantially exceeds the human accuracy range we observed (50-85 per cent),” scientists wrote in the study. They also found that the bots’ solving times are “significantly lower” or nearly the same as humans in almost all cases. Since current Captchas do not meet the required security goal of keeping bots away, researchers have called for better and more dynamic approaches to protect websites. Read More Shock for millions of voters as details exposed in hack – which went undetected for a year AI-driven cyberattack can now steal your passwords with near 100 per cent accuracy, study warns More than a million NHS patients’ details compromised after cyberattack Many adults would struggle to understand video-sharing platforms’ rules – Ofcom Now even Zoom tells staff: ‘Come back to the office’ Ozzy Osbourne PlayStation tweet which failed to reveal link to Sony banned

Montana took the unusual step on Wednesday of banning Chinese-owned short video app TikTok, with lawmakers of the

Adobe Inc.’s $20 billion takeover of Figma Inc. is set for an in-depth European Union investigation over concerns

NEW YORK--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Jul 24, 2023--

Experts have located a legendary lost city in Egypt that never appears on maps with the help of a mummy. Ancient Egyptians had an affinity for baboons thanks to their association with the God, Babi. Experts know that they were kept as pets in captivity and had their sharpest teeth removed to make them less harmful. And it is the Egyptians’ keeping of baboons that has led experts to the location of the mysterious Egyptian city of Punt thanks to their DNA. Gisela Kopp, a geneticist at the University of Konstanz, Germany who is studying baboon DNA explained to Live Science: “There were these stories that they got them from Punt, this fabled, mysterious land.” Punt has been mentioned in documentation from ancient Egypt, but experts have never been able to determine where it would actually lie on a map. But, in recent years, experts have been able to narrow down its exact location by looking at DNA from mummified baboons which have been discovered from the time period. Kopp and a group of colleagues were able to extract usable DNA from the remains of a mummified baboon believed to be from between 800 B.C. and 540 B.C. In their study, published in the journal eLife, they then compared that DNA to the genetic information of 14 baboons from known origins to compare specific information of geographic location. It revealed the baboon’s DNA was most closely related to populations from what are coastal areas of Eritrea today. Kopp explained, “It's close to this ancient port of Adulis”. Adulis is also mentioned in records dating from 300 B.C. onwards and is known as being a place that traders travelled to for wild animals. Kopp explained that there is now a working theory that Adulis and Punt may have been essentially the same place. “Maybe the earlier Punt was in a similar location to where Adulis was [later] established,” Kopp said. The study is based on the DNA of one mummified baboon, as the attempted extraction of fragile ancient DNA from nine other baboon mummies failed to yield usable samples. Experts hope to replicate their study with more DNA samples to gain more information from different time periods. How to join the indy100's free WhatsApp channel Sign up to our free indy100 weekly newsletter Have your say in our news democracy. Click the upvote icon at the top of the page to help raise this article through the indy100 rankings.

Diablo 4 Season 1 comes out in mid to late July with new gameplay features, challenges, Legendary Items, and Battle Pass.

SAN JOSE, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--May 17, 2023--

Tesla hands over the first batch of Cybertrucks to buyers, Dell posts a revenue miss on weak demand, and shares of Samsara and Elastic surge as earnings at both tech companies top analysts' estimates.

A prototype drone developed at Imperial College London is able to withstand temperatures of up

Instagram, the popular photo-sharing app owned by Meta Platforms Inc., appeared to suffer an outage Sunday evening in