Researchers at Google have begun testing a new image based captcha they say can help sites fight back against spammers and fraudsters. The new captchas present the user with an upside down image. All they have to do is flip it so its right side up. Simple, right? Not for machines! It rejects any image that a computer may have learned to recognize, such as human faces.

          The new puzzles could be built around a site’s theme — for instance, cartoons at a Disney site, or objects for sale at eBay, said Rich Gossweiler, a senior research scientist at Google who led the team that developed the system. It can be put in place rapidly, he said, and has an almost limitless supply of images. “Our technique expands the vocabulary of captchas” beyond obfuscated characters, he said. “And it might make the process less of a chore. It’s fun to solve a puzzle.”

Since the traditional text based captchas have long since been cracked by scammers, this new image based type might be just what the doctor ordered. Text based captchas are easily solved by machines and in some cases, the scammers simply pay real people a few cents for every captcha they solve. This leads to thousands of fake email accounts being set up and used for spamming or phishing.

A new kind of audio captcha, used for people who are unable to handle the text or image varieties due to disabilities, is also being tested. This one uses phrases from old radio shows instead of random words. Researchers say this makes it much harder for machines to understand and solve.

Will these new captchas save the day and make the technology valuable again? Only time will tell.