If you're like me, computers have long since become better at solving captchas than you are. I mean, how much of a motorcycle counts as being 'a motorcycle in the square'? I sure don't know. No, the battle to test whether a web user is a human or a computer is over, and computers have won. So now what? Enter mCaptcha. "Our broader goal," write the authors, "is to stop attempting to distinguish between humans and robots and return to captcha's original intent: providing denial of service (DoS) protection." They do this by requiring a 'proof of work' from the web browser. It's a single-use computation that can be performed pretty quickly by your web browser, but would bog down an AI or web scraper trying to make as many requests as possible. If it were me, I would want to see this 'proof of work' be some actually useful computation (which could then be thought of as the 'price' to access a website). But this is a good place to start.
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