Sunday, November 14, 2010

WTF? - Captcha

You have probably seen them and used them but did you know what they are called? Those distorted words that you have to decipher to prove you are a real human and not some computer operated site crawler or 'bot'.
They are annoying, but considering they keep 99% of computerized spam off our social media, they are a necessary evil. There are a few different styles but they all work on the same premise that computer character recognition is inferior to the human version.

That is a fine and dandy until the Captcha generator throws you a curve-ball in the form of an undecipherable pair of words.
WTF does this say? Leave a comment if you can read it
How am I supposed to validate my humanity if I can't read the words on the screen? The painful irony of the whole Captcha system is that the images are generated by computers. The very machines that we are trying to keep out of our forums and comments sections are the ones we are trusting with the anti-bot security.

Can we truly trust the computers not to be messing with us? I think the computers are getting smarter and may be drawing us into a false sense of security, and this morning my suspicions were compounded by this.




1 comment :

Janene Murphy said...

One time I was commenting on a post about excessive drinking and got a captcha code that said, 'alcohol misfit.' How's that for the system screwing with you!

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