Thursday, May 29, 2008

I hate unreadable Captchas.

The term "CAPTCHA" was coined in 2000 by Luis von Ahn, Manuel Blum, Nicholas J. Hopper (all of Carnegie Mellon University), and John Langford (then of IBM). It is a contrived acronym for "Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart", trademarked by Carnegie Mellon University.

A CAPTCHA is sometimes described as a reverse Turing test, because it is administered by a machine and targeted to a human, in contrast to the standard Turing test that is typically administered by a human and targeted to a machine.

Lately on web sites were I have to validate I'm getting captchas like this:

Sometimes I get three or four in a row which are unreadable. Would it just be better to hire a few network police and have public humiliation for anyone caught defrauding a web site with spam? These things are really just another way spammers abuse us.

2 comments:

Jim Davis said...

Captchas are one of those things, they can be done well i.e 4 + 4 = but most of the time they are implemented as a pile of unreadable rubbish which just annoys users and motivates them to leave the site.

lastcrazyhorn said...

These things annoy the p!ss out of me. I mean, seriously, when will developers learn to edit? Or better yet, actually test their products on people different from themselves. Grr. But that's a rant for another day (and site - like my own).