‘Does anybody like CAPTCHAs?’ – Cloudflare CTO John Graham-Cumming envisages a frictionless future for website Turing tests
INTERVIEW The hegemony of CAPTCHAs, the reliably infuriating means by which websites distinguish human users from bots, is – mercifully – in peril.
John Graham-Cumming, chief technology officer (CTO) at web security and performance specialist Cloudflare, tells The Daily Swig that an alternative technology developed by Cloudflare, Apple, Google, and others eliminates the friction and privacy infringements involved in clicking squares that contain bicycles, vans, or traffic lights.
Incidentally, CAPTCHAs – or ‘Completely Automated Public Turing Tests to tell Computers and Humans Apart’ – reference the legendary computer scientist Alan Turing, who received a posthumous apology from the UK government in 2009 following an online campaign by Graham-Cumming.
Graham-Cumming, the POPFile architect who shares with fellow Brit Turing a remarkable mathematical acuity, also talks HTTP/3, ‘zero trust’ architecture, the distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) landscape, and novel ways to generate random, cryptographic numbers.
