Monday, June 17, 2024

For some reason, the University of Utah officially recognizes today as Juneteenth. So, I will be taking today off and working on Wednesday.

Tuesday, June 18, 2024

Great day today! Got an early start, finalized my summer project idea (a bit late, I know), and got a solid start on data collection.

Progress:

• Met with Sameer
• Initialized guiding research documents
  • Agenda – keeps track of what tasks there are to tackle
  • Progress – keeps track of what there is to do, task completion, questions, concerns, and what there is to do next time on a session-by-session basis
• Created taxonomy of CAPTCHA types with the potential for ambiguous answers
• Installed the Tor Browser
• Collected a few sample CAPTCHAs

Wednesday, June 19, 2024

Kind of a weird workday; I’m starting to worry that there isn’t anything particularly useful that will come of this study, even if it is mildly interesting. I’m contemplating changing ideas once again, although it feels like at this point, this may not be an option. Anyway, I did “collect” some CAPTCHAs today, and explore some providers’ services. I’m hoping to either flesh out a real, valuable potential outcome for this work, or just figure out something else to do.

Progress:

• Collected & organized CAPTCHA screenshots
• Created Qualtrics account
• Found free CAPTCHA services
  • Google reCAPTCHA
    • v2 - classic challenges
    • v3 - score-based
  • Cloudflare Turnstile
• Registered account with Google reCAPTCHA v2 through GCP
• Registered for Cloudflare Turnstile
• Light ad hoc testing on CAPTCHA administration parameters (e.g. how many challenges will be shown, timeout length estimation, etc)

Thursday, June 20, 2024

Progress:

• Search for other CAPTCHA providers (i.e. other than Google, Cloudflare)
• Deploy a test website to play around with the CAPTCHA embeds

Friday, June 21, 2024

Progress:

• Start creating Qualtrics Survey (focused only on “contains” type of image grid CAPTCHA)
  • Present CAPTCHA per question, ask to select squares
  • Brainstorm usability questions

Week 4 Summary

Decent enough week. Unfortunately, I am simply not interested in this CAPTCHA project idea. On top of that, CAPTCHA v2 is being phased out by many websites. As such, the potential outcomes are not particularly useful even if I did find the work enjoyable.

I’ve decided I will pursue alternative ideas next week. Given the end of next week marks my halfway point through the program, I will have to solidify my idea by next Friday. I intend on doing something related to passkeys or TLS – something that looks at web security on a sociotechnical level.