The story of reCAPTCHA

Easy on Humans, Hard on Bots—that is the tagline of reCAPTCHA, which states the simple idea that reCAPTCHA is a system that establishes whether a user on an application or website is a genuine human user or an automated script. reCAPTCHA is a specific implementation of the CAPTCHA technology—a method that uses visuals with distorted, squiggly letters and numbers and challenges the user to decipher the contents of the visual image and write it out in a plain format. 

If you were a regular internet user in the early 2000s, you would have seen images resembling the following CAPTCHA on a number of websites:

CAPTCHA is an acronym for Completely Automated Public Turing Test To Tell Computers and Humans Apart. 

Popularized by Yahoo, the CAPTCHA system was rapidly adopted for use on millions of websites. However, despite the boost...