patndoris TechnoGeek

Surely at one time or another, you have stumbled through the land of CAPTCHA. You know what it is. No, it is not an amazing beautiful and magical land with lions and tigers and bears oh my! Oops! Wrong story. No, surely not! They are those maddening little boxes with letters and numbers and squiggles oh my!

I personally have a terrible time with some of them. I fully realize the intent is to stop the robots, to identify the invisible computer user as a human. I mean really, many of them only a human could possibly read. Uh, well some of them humans can read. Some them cannot be interpreted, even by upright walking, opposable thumb endowed, humanoids. It often takes two, three, four tries to get it right. Other times, they are simple as pie. It sometimes leaves me wondering just which ones a bot can crack and which ones it cannot.

I saw a recent write up about CAPTCHA codes and how well (or how poorly) they were designed. Check out some of the stronger and weaker CAPTCHA codes. Some will likely look familiar. I find the Yahoo CAPTCHA codes make me want to scream, but apparently they are actually fairly strong in the scheme of things. Today I encountered a very simple one - one I knew I’d done correctly and yet it still wouldn’t let me in the site I was trying to register for. I finally had to kill my registration and start all over to get one I could do.  Oh how I hate those things! I’d much rather have a nice simple owl or monkey to choose from. Such visual systems are apparently harder to implement, but why should users be the ones left frustrated? Why not let those putting the codes in place spend a little hair yanking time rather than the multitude of site visitors? Hmmm, that makes you wonder does it not?

In case after all this rambling you still ask what exactly does CAPTCHA mean? You are asking yes? Well, it is an acronym (and oh how you know I love those!) for the very odd phrase "Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart". I just had to share that little gem of useless knowledge with you in the hopes you will attempt to impress others with your acquired knowledge.  (And if you want more information you can visit The Official CAPTCHA site.)

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