We’ve all seen those CAPTCHA codes on websites – whether you’re trying to submit a link to a social bookmarking platform or you’re signing up for a service, they all seem to want us to prove we’re human in an effort to defeat the spambots. Although they can sometimes be annoying and difficult to read, they’re a necessary evil in today’s spam-filled climate, but they’re not foolproof and sometimes bots can break even the most convoluted of these codes.

That could be set to change however, with NuCaptcha – a video-based version of the human authentication system which replaces the familiar string of sometimes illegible numbers and letters with a brief Flash animation. From the videos we’ve seen they seem far more legible to the human eye and is purported by its creators to be far more secure than the static style.

We’ve not trialled it here yet, but it certainly seems like it could be advantageous for a number of uses, but there are some disadvantages to it too – due to its being Flash, it’s going to be a far larger file than a simple text-based CAPTCHA, and there’s the Apple-shaped elephant in the room too. Flash doesn’t work on iPhones or their other mobile devices and with these devices taking an increasing share of the online market every day, this could turn out to be their undoing.

Whether it reaches the wide scale adoption that the developers are clearly hoping for, it’s certainly an interesting new take on security protocols and could well be a step in the right direction to making CAPTCHAs more readable and more secure.