Negative Captcha
A negative captcha has the exact same purpose as your run-of-the-mill image captcha: To keep bots from submitting forms. Image ("positive") captchas do this by implementing a step which only humans can do, but bots cannot: read jumbled characters from an image.
This project is dead. Due to the way that browsers now interact with autocomplete and accessibility features it's not feasible to use this same style of captcha. Keeping this for historical purposes.
Features
- Captcha Recognition
Tags
- rails
Negative Captcha News & Activities
Recent activities
Negative Captcha information
Developed by
Erik PetersonLicensing
Open Source (MIT) and Free product.Written in
Alternatives
13 alternatives listedSupported Languages
- English
What is Negative Captcha?
A negative captcha has the exact same purpose as your run-of-the-mill image captcha: To keep bots from submitting forms. Image ("positive") captchas do this by implementing a step which only humans can do, but bots cannot: read jumbled characters from an image. But this is bad. It creates usability problems, it hurts conversion rates, and it confuses the shit out of lots of people. Why not do it the other way around? Negative captchas create a form that has tasks that only bots can perform, but humans cannot. This has the exact same effect, with (anecdotally) a much lower false positive identification rate when compared with positive captchas. All of this comes without making humans go through any extra trouble to submit the form. It really is win-win.
Comments and Reviews
It’s innovative, breaks out of the box, and is user-friendly.
Its a different approach than Googles, detects bots and seems to be unbreakable, due to the fields being only recognized by humans and security keys being used.
It can theoretically be broken by analyzing the DOM, according to the author. But it’s much more theoretical than normal CAPTCHAS, which are an arms race that is inherently doomed to fail. And also much easier to improve. I already came up with several solutions that would make this not even an arms race anymore, but be inherently impossible for a machine.