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

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Conspiracy theorist and right-wing comedian Owen Benjamin is now claiming that nuclear bombs do not exist because there is evidence of cameras filming nuclear blasts. “It’s weird that the nuclear blasts vaporised brick houses but not the old times camera recording it. It’s because nukes are fake.” Benjamin claims. “Hiroshima and Nagasaki never had any fall out radiation. The whole narrative and all the evidence is absurd.” Sign up to our free Indy100 weekly newsletter Twitter was quick to add context through community notes saying: “the cameras were in bunkers 5 miles away from ground zero with telescopic lenses allowing for the camera’s to record the nuclear explosion.” In regards to Benjamin’s claim regarding Hiroshima and Nagasaki, they write that they “have no fallout radiation today as the atomic bombs were detonated at an altitude of about 600m.” His tweet has over 10,000 likes. Benjamin follows up his false claims by saying “there are no nuclear bombs with fallout radiation.” And that the whole world is “in on it”. He adds that people have been “tricked” saying “stop being afraid. It’s fake.” Most disagreed and pushed back against Benjamin’s claim. One user asked for his explanation for what happened in Nagasaki and Hiroshima. He replied by saying they were “bombed with conventional firebombs” and told another user that it was “just large amounts of TNT.” Others tried to explain why Benjamin was wrong: But there were some who defended and agreed with Benjamin: Benjamin also claims that the video in his tweet is of a toy model, and that those explaining how the camera was filmed from far away and protected are lying. He replied to a comment from a user saying they “learned something from the community notes”, sarcastically saying, “yeah you can record inside a house from 5 miles away in 1945.” When asked flat out by a user “are nuclear weapons real?” Benjamin replies: “No. Zero evidence they exist outside of Hollywood movies. Remember hiding under your desk? Looking back does that make sense?” This isn’t the first time Benjamin has spread conspiracy theories on Twitter, he has previously engaged in anti-Semitic conspiracy theories and Holocaust denial as well as spreading misinformation about Covid. 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.

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