Kristof Milak, who won two golds at the 2022 world swimming championships, said Wednesday he will skip this year's event in Japan claiming: "I am currently neither physically nor mentally in a position to be...

What's the prize money for the Nathan's Hot Dog Eating Contest?

'We’re evolutionary, and so we evolve in small, tiny increments along the way, and I think that’s very important,' Kelly Ripa said about 'Live'

Twenty-two years after the September 11 jihadist attacks on the United States, the remains of two people who died in the collapse of the World Trade Center have been identified through DNA analysis, the authorities said ahead...

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 it’s 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 ‘Billions’ of computers potentially affect by huge security vulnerability AI breakthrough could dramatically reduce planes’ global warming impact Earth hit by powerful ‘X-1’ solar flare, after fears of ‘cannibal’ blast

Michael Strahan's daughter Isabella has already planned her move away from her father to Los Angeles for college

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Germany ended Latvia's dream run at the Basketball World Cup on Wednesday with a nervy 81-79 win to squeeze into the semi-finals and a...

Google's position as king of the search engines is under threat like never before, but the firm's global policy chief told AFP this week it still had...

A strong earnings season for technology companies is going largely unrewarded in a stock market that has already

The Republican-controlled Wisconsin Senate voted Thursday to fire the state's top elections administrator, Meagan Wolfe -- a move that is all but certain to trigger a legal battle over who will oversee voting in one of the nation's most important presidential swing states as the 2024 election approaches.

BEIJING A European Commission investigation into Chinese electric vehicles (EVs) feared to have benefited from state subsidies will