The simplicity of it is logic defying. It used to be that you had to find crosswalks or move puzzle pieces or type blurred letters and numbers, but NOW all the sudden I can just click a box and HEY!, I’m human?
That’s hardly the Turing Test I’d expected.
Your mouse movement and keyboard events are available to webpages that you’ve loaded, when the browser window is focused.
This isn’t nefarious - it allows websites to build nice UIs that most people enjoy using, most of the time.
There’s lots of shady stuff going on in browsers, this isn’t really one of them.
Hmm, I can think of some ways to misuse this. And I’m not very smart at all.
I mean, how do you think websites work? Of course your mouse and keyboard events are available, otherwise you wouldn’t be able to interact with a website at all.
This was the slap on the head I needed. I now get what you mean by interact with my keyboard. In other words = can tell what I’m typing. Like perfectly normal function of websites.
I didn’t understand the “focus” part and how it helped. I think I said earlier, I’m not particularly smart.
Say more
Like those sites that ask me to sign in using Google (or other options) and then Google asks me for the password?
Pretty easy to grab passwords I think.
Those websites send you directly to Google, so they no longer have control of the web page when you’re entering your password.
This is why Google sign-in can’t be embedded and uses the password input type for the password type. Most SSOs do this as well.
To clarify, websites can’t capture keyboard events that were typed into a different website like you’re thinking. Think of going to a web game that let’s you use WASD for controlling your character. It’s able to capture those events on that page because its in focus. When a site goes out of focus (such as switching tabs or switching to another window that’s not the browser), it loses that ability. Overall, it’s very secure.
I was more wondering how you thought capturing the mouse movements would lead to security issues.