I never know why it was called a CAPTCHA. Now I do, thanks to a Cloudflare blog post!
Why CAPTCHAs?
In many instances, businesses need a way to tell whether an online user is human or not. Typically those reasons relate to security, or abuse of an online service. Back at the turn of the century, CAPTCHAs were created to do just that. The first one was developed back in 1997, and the term (“Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart”) was coined in 2003 by Luis von Ahn, Manuel Blum, Nicholas J. Hopper, and John Langford.
Humanity wastes about 500 years per day on CAPTCHAs. It’s time to end this madness
An experiment that uses hardware security keys (like a YubiKey) to replace CAPTCHAs completely. The idea is rather simple: if a real human is sitting at their keyboard or uses their phone, they can touch their security key’s button or bring it near their phone to demonstrate that they are human.