Id Software’s evergreen first-person shooter can do something convenient that’s on pretty much every website, and it’s more of an annoyance than a real security feature…

Captchas are not everyone’s cup of tea. There’s nothing worse than when you have an image, and then you check all the boxes with, say, a motorcycle on it, and the fender slips a few pixels into a box you didn’t check, and then you have to start over with another, usually much more complicated image, and it can all be repeated from the beginning.

Guillermo Rauch, the CEO of Vercel, probably did this more than once and created the DOOM captcha. Since id Software’s game is open source, we’ve seen more than one case of the FPS running on devices not designed for video games at all (and we’ve reported on many of these cases, but we still miss the toaster port…). And the task is simple: kill three monsters. This is a fun way to prove that, yes, we are human.

The DOOM Captcha is a WebAssembly application that runs low-level code in the browser and is fairly easy to get up and running. No complaints about usability either, as you have to use the arrow keys and spacebar to play the game. But where will this be used? If Rauch has put it together (and not badly, by the way), then let’s not waste a little finger exercise that should be fun. It would be better to make the website believe that we are human, instead of clicking on the pictures where the staircase is running…

At least Microsoft could use this. After all, they own the DOOM IP, after the acquisition of ZeniMax Media gave them Bethesda and all the studios and intellectual property under them. At least they wouldn’t even have a legal problem, as there would be nothing stopping them from using it legally…

Source: PCGamer