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:
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.
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).
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