Cloudflare Takes a Stab at a Captcha That Doesn’t Suck

It's a bitter rage that comes from being asked to click every box that contains a parking meter only to be told that you missed one because of a tiny piece of gray in the center of the square. It's a familiar fury, and one that captchas have been provoking across the web for years, but these frustrating tools are important for blocking bots from conducting fraud and other abuses. The new version of reCaptcha uses machine learning to silently check humanness behind the scenes and phase out the garbled, blurry strings of letters. A competitor is about to be released by the internet infrastructure company.

You don't need to be a customer of Cloudflare to use Turnstile, it's free. Turnstile is based on a tool that was released for its own services. You are completing a challenge when you do a captcha If the tool isn't confident, you won't be able to solve a puzzle or a harder challenge. Managed Challenge constantly tests different types of puzzles to see if they are less frustrating for users.

Captchas are an important security defense, but Cloudflare is billing Turnstile as particularly privacy-protective. The service doesn't check advertising cookies or login cookies when it looks at some browser session data. The company plans to reduce how much data they see. Turnstile is a tool for attesting that a user is human and reducing the need for captchas.

In the last few years, researchers have found that reCaptcha checks to see if a user has a cookie in their account as a factor in determining whether they are human. Some people think that reCaptcha data could be used in targeted advertising campaigns.

Since launching Managed Challenge, it has reduced the number of captchas it serves. Users used to spend an average of 32 seconds doing captchas on the company's websites. The new feature's silent, behind-the-scenes challenges have caused the average wait time to increase. The captcha option in the dashboard has been changed. The company says that it is an outdated tool that people shouldn't use.

Turnstile is part of an effort to make captchas easier to use. Adoption of new alternatives might be hampered by reCaptcha's familiarity. It may be a good time for a new player, especially one that doesn't make you want to throw your laptop into the sea.