captcha a necessary annoyance
Mar 14, 2008
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What is captcha anyway? well it's a contrived acronym for "Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart". Whoa, what does this mean? In a nutshell, it's a simple test that a human can do easily and a computer program cannot. It is primarily used on websites as a way to reduce spam, specifically spam that is entered by web spiders that crawl around the net posting spam without human intervention. If the spam bot is presented with a test that it must pass to post it's spam, and the spam bot fails, the spam is blocked; an actual human who wants to post will easily be able to answer the test correctly and his content will be posted.
The problem is that the spam bots are getting smarter, therefore the captcha on websites have stepped up a notch. What used to be an easy test to read set of a few clear letters and numbers has become a game of trying to figure out what the letter soup says, after the soup has been in the blender.
I'd like to see a new form of captcha, one where the test is easy again. Perhaps by showing a sequence of images, and asking the user to pick a picture out of a set of pictures, for example a bunch of pictures of cats with one picture of a dog, the user must pick the dog. It's a game of trying to keep one step ahead of the spammers, being able to present a test that a human can pass and the spam bots cannot, weighing the user's annoyance with spam against the user's annoyance with a really hard captcha.
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