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Comment by cheshire137 | Hacker News Reader

I wish they would explain more about how the user interacts with the whole reCAPTCHA leads them to know it's a person and not a robot, but maybe they're worried about people writing bots to get around their protections.

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> However, CAPTCHAs aren't going away just yet. In cases when the risk analysis engine can't confidently predict whether a user is a human or an abusive agent, it will prompt a CAPTCHA to elicit more cues, increasing the number of security checkpoints to confirm the user is valid.

Probably using a combination of G+ and GA to check your 'history' to see the activity is like a normal human. Visits a couple news sites each day, checks their gmail, searches for random crap randomly, GA registered a 'conversion' for some company = probably a human

I was thinking they may be looking at how long it takes for a user to click the "I'm not a robot" link. A robot would probably load the page and quickly, without delay, send the HTTP POST but I have to imagine they thought of this already and bots writers would quickly add a sleep() call in there at some point... Yea, I wonder about their internal logic too.

Or more likely they realize that explaining that your robot quotient is based on a statistical analysis of the last 6 hours of your browser traffic would probably freak everybody the fuck out.

They're almost certainly using the adwords cookies that get hit from 90% of the sites out there to figure out if you're a bot or not.

True enough, although it doesn't stop Google Now from coming up with helpful suggestions like "Hey, we noticed you were looking at this movie; would you like to see it on Amazon?"

Giving that away will give the bots a head start to figure out how to overcome this new roadblock.

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