- Turnstile is a new alternative to CAPTCHA that doesn’t require human interaction.
- The solution is said to maintain privacy while collecting less data.
- Turnstile is available for free to all, improving its chances of replacing CAPTCHA which is widely used.
The Turing Test was designed to tell whether or not a computer could think like a human being, but CAPTCHA is designed to ensure that something is definitely being used by a human.
The trouble is that CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart) is frustrating to use and this can negatively impact a user’s experience.
Enter Cloudflare which last week announced it has a better solution. That solution is something Cloudflare calls Turnstile.
“Cloudflare is taking one of the most hated pieces of Internet technology, and making it easier, more secure, and more private for everyone to use,” explains co-founder and chief executive officer at Cloudflare, Matthew Prince. “Similar to our 1.1.1.1 app that makes every user and the Internet safer, we’re excited to share Turnstile with developers of any size and anywhere, for an improved and more private end user experience.”
The firm doesn’t go into specifics about how Turnstile works – for good reason – but it has assured media and experts the solution preserves privacy. The solution will reportedly choose a suite of browser challenges from a rotation list. The technology then works behind the scenes by looking for signals that a user is human.
“Turnstile can fine-tune the difficulty of the challenge, presenting harder challenges to visitors that exhibit non-human behaviors. Additionally, Turnstile recognizes Private Access Tokens from users on the latest versions of macOS or iOS, allowing Turnstile to validate a device with the help of the device vendor, and without collecting, touching or storing user device data,” Cloudflare explained in a press release.
The firm reports that Turnstile has the same stable solve rate as CAPTCHA does. In its own implementation of the technology, Cloudflare reduced its use of CAPTCHA by 91 percent and saved visitors an average of 31 seconds that they would’ve spent deciding whether the edge of a traffic light counts as a traffic light.
Cloudflare is seemingly so confident about its solution that it is giving it away for free. Existing Cloudflare customers can access Turnstile via their dashboard on the left-hand navigation panel. New customers can head to this link to sign up and express their interest in Turnstile.
We don’t disagree that CAPTCHA’s can be incredibly annoying but we’re curious to see whether Turnstile can make them a thing of the past. Of course, that will only happen if Turnstile is picked up by a number of websites although, given Cloudflare is giving it away for free maybe it’s in with a shot so long as nobody unplugs the wrong cable.
[Image – CC 0 Pixabay]
