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There is now a Doom-flavored CAPTCHA

There is now a Doom-flavored CAPTCHA (Image Source: BritGeeks on Reddit)
There is now a Doom-flavored CAPTCHA (Image Source: BritGeeks on Reddit)
Forget traffic lights. Kill three demons to prove you're human. Guillermo Rauch, CEO of Vercel, used the cloud service's AI-based Generative UI to build a Doom CAPTCHA that has you killing demons to verify your identity.

Let's face it. We all put up with clicking on fire hydrants and traffic lights in annoying CAPTCHAs, but they don't have to be boring. Guillermo Rauch, CEO of Vercel, a cloud service company, used his AI-based Generative UI to create a CAPTCHA that bucks tradition and has you shooting demons in Doom instead. 

The concept is simple: You spawn on a Doom map and have to kill three enemies to proceed with the verification. To make things spicy, this is old-school Doom, meaning no mouselook, and difficulty flags set to Nightmare, the hardest difficulty. 

For veterans of the game, this isn't a problem, but I had to give it a couple of tries before I came up with a solution. I cheesed it by triggering the enemies and running back into the starting area to kill them from afar. Seems like I wasn't the only one. People who have tried this out at Hacker News (via TechCrunch) have mixed reactions. Here's a tip - you can strafe by holding down the Alt key.   

Rauch isn't the first to use this idea. Camps Orteza did it in 2021, making you kill four demons to proceed, but it's a lot easier and doesn't feel like a real Doom map.

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Rohith Bhaskar, 2025-01- 2 (Update: 2025-01- 2)