HCaptcha
| File:Hcaptcha logo.png | |
| Product type | CAPTCHA |
|---|---|
| Owner | Intuitive Machines., Inc. |
| Country | United States |
| Introduced | 2018 |
| Related brands | reCAPTCHA |
| Markets | Cryptocurrency |
| Website | https://hcaptcha.com/ |
hCaptcha is a CAPTCHA service by developed Intuition Machines Inc that was adopted by Cloudflare.
About
An hCaptcha is a form that is filled out as to detect whether the user of a site is human. Filling out an hCaptcha is similar to filling out a reCAPTCHA. The program asks the user to prove they are human by asking the user to select all images matching a generated query, called a label, stored in the datasets that hCaptcha uses. If a user enters an hCaptcha successfully, the owner of the website hosting the captcha gets paid in consumer credit.[1] The 'h' in "hCaptcha" stands for "human", and the service was originally used for Ethereum Blockchain.[2] hCaptcha makes revenue by selling it's datasets to 3rd party companies.
Background
hCaptcha was created by Eli-Shaoul Khedouri and his team in Vietnam. He founded Intuition Machines Inc in 2017. Early development of hCaptcha involved Khedouri hiring full time workers in Vietnam to match images to labels and to build the dataset. The hiring of these workers was not cost effective. Khedouri switched to using Captcha Farmers. Captcha Farmers are people who get paid a fraction of a cent to solve a CAPTCHA. According to ZDnet, these workers may recieve as little as US$2 an hour.[3] hCaptcha was originally designed to run over Intuition's HUMAN Protocol to secure the Ethereum blockchain. In 2019, Fastcompany reported that ~10 million users were interacting with hCaptcha each month and that global technology companies shared hCaptcha's datasets.[2]
HUMAN Protocol
The HUMAN protocol is what hCaptcha's datasets run on. The HUMAN protocol's job is to make sure that all information stored in hCaptcha's dataset is accurate. The Protocol is responsible for paying website owners in it's store credit called "Human Tokens", when the site's clients successfully fill out an hCaptcha.[4]
Adoption
It was announced on April 8, 2020[5] by Cloudflare as the company's official CAPTCHA service. Cloudflare moved to hCaptcha over Google's reCAPTCHA service due to privacy and sustainability concerns regarding Google's collection of data and, more recently, the company charging for the service.[6][7] According to Cloudflare, staying with reCAPTCHA "would have added millions of dollars in annual costs just to continue to use reCAPTCHA for our free users". hCaptcha is said to collect less user information than Google's reCAPTCHA. It also works in countries like China where Google services are blocked by the great firewall.[8][9][10]
References
- ↑ "Cloudflare Dumps Google's ReCAPTCHA Over Privacy Concerns, Costs" (in en). https://www.pcmag.com/news/cloudflare-dumps-googles-recaptcha-over-privacy-concerns-costs.
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 Schwab, Katharine (2019-07-17). "Suspicious of Google’s reCaptcha? Here’s a popular alternative" (in en-US). https://www.fastcompany.com/90377406/suspicious-of-googles-recaptcha-heres-a-popular-alternative.
- ↑ Danchev, Dancho. "Inside India's CAPTCHA solving economy" (in en). https://www.zdnet.com/article/inside-indias-captcha-solving-economy/.
- ↑ "hCaptcha" (in en). 2019-05-17. https://www.drupal.org/project/hcaptcha.
- ↑ "Moving from reCAPTCHA to hCaptcha" (in en). 2020-04-08. https://blog.cloudflare.com/moving-from-recaptcha-to-hcaptcha/.
- ↑ "Cloudflare ditches Google's reCAPTCHA because of privacy concerns and costs" (in en). 2020-04-13. https://betanews.com/2020/04/13/cloudflare-ditches-google-recaptcha-moves-to-hcaptcha/.
- ↑ "Cloudflare dumps Google's reCAPTCHA, moves to hCaptcha as free ride ends (and something about privacy)" (in en). https://www.theregister.com/2020/04/09/cloudflare_dumps_recaptcha/.
- ↑ April 2020, Anthony Spadafora 09. "Cloudflare chooses hCaptcha over Google's reCAPTCHA" (in en). https://www.techradar.com/news/cloudflare-chooses-hcaptcha-over-googles-recaptcha.
- ↑ Cimpanu, Catalin. "Cloudflare dumps reCAPTCHA as Google intends to charge for its use" (in en). https://www.zdnet.com/article/cloudflare-dumps-recaptcha-as-google-intends-to-charge-for-its-use/.
- ↑ "Cloudflare drops Google's reCAPTCHA due to privacy concerns" (in en-us). https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/technology/cloudflare-drops-googles-recaptcha-due-to-privacy-concerns/.
External links
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