Could the days of the annoying and increasingly ineffective CAPTCHA web verification box finally be numbered?
According to reports, Global ticket sales powerhouse Ticketmaster is abandoning the standard CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Humans and Computers Apart) in favour of a puzzle-based system from US firm, Solve Media.
This drops the squiggly and easy-to-mistype CAPTCHA's that currently protect most web systems from bots with simple puzzles that would, the theory goes, be harder for a computer to beat.
Where a conventional CAPTCHA might ask the user to enter the phrase 'Progress aRaTEena' after deciphering distorted letters in one half of the phrase, Solve Media's just asks the user a multiple-choice question.
To add salt to this, Solve Media's system employs a range of different puzzles answers to the same question, raising their complexity if it suspects an automated system is entering the text.
That consumers get frustrated with standard CAPTCHA's has been known for years but Ticketmaster is one of the first major companies to go as far as to abandon them altogether in order to streamline online sales.
A wide range of well-known brands have used Solve Media's puzzles but usually only for one-off interactions such as competitions.
"Anecdotally, we're starting to see an uptick in fan satisfaction. We're happy with what we've seen from a security standpoint as well," Ticketmaster's ecommerce vice president Kip Levin told AP.
There's another reason to drop CAPTCHAs - while better than nothing they don't work.
For the last decade web technologists have fought a losing battle to keep out bots, resulting in numerous small innovations. But even some of those have turned out to have weaknesses.
Even quite complex CAPTCHA's can be broken with reasonable consistency using machine intelligence. The problem has always been that the CAPTCHA concept depends on visual cues; making these more complex at best only buys time. Eventually machines catch up.
The ticketing industry has been on the receiving end of these systems, as a case from 2010 underlines in which three men were accused of building an automated network capable of breaking CAPTCHAs fast enough to automate ticketing buying to feed touts.
Will Solve Media's innovation keep the touts out? Only time will tell.