No one likes reCAPTCHA and everyone's encountered it before. Now the technique of asking users to type in distorted text in order to weed out bots from humans is headed for retirement.

Maybe you're not familiar with reCAPTCHA by name, but, as Google explains in a welcome blog post announcement: "reCAPTCHA protects the websites you love from spam and abuse. So, when you go online—say, for some last-minute holiday shopping—you won't be competing with robots and abusive scripts to access sites. For years, we’ve prompted users to confirm they aren’t robots by asking them to read distorted text and type it into a box, like this:"

Okay, this isn't the example Google used, but it's more fun:

lolcaptcha.jpg

Google touted the fact that the old reCAPTCHA helped digitize books and maps, so all that typing from images was, at least, not for nothing. But apparently Google has digitized everything, since now, reCAPTCHA is headed to a farm upstate.

It would seem that now Google can tell if you're a person much faster, just based on the way you click a box saying you're human, as Wired explains. That is a little unsettling, but it's better than the tedious task that preceded it.

In some situations you'll still have to enter some distorted text and feel woozy, and on smart phones you'll be given another Turing test to see if you're a person, a matching game that looks like this:

turkey_captcha.png
A new mobile reCAPTCHA: Google

The new "No CAPTCHA reCAPTCHA" is already on sites including Snapchat and Wordpress, reports TechCrunch.

So, if you're human, rejoice! The best test is if you laugh at the following:

Image: Techeblog