Ridiculous.
WTF is up with captchas?
Seriously.
You can't send email, buy concert tickets, join message forums, or download
Hey, I get it. It's all about security and making sure you're not a robot or a spammer. But really, if some entity wants to screw around on the internet bad enough, they'll find a way.
In the beginning, at least they had you typing in actual words, but now they look like this:
Come on!
And what about the ones that are just plain impossible to read:
What is that first word? Car? Rat? The symbol for Pi?
Let's look at the history of these inane things, from the always reliable Wikipedia:
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.
Yeah, eff those guys.
And what a lame acronym. Talk about convoluted. Why not just call it DOUCHE, for "Dumb and Otherwise Useless Computer Hos ruin Everything."
Surely there has to be a better way to prove you're not a computer when you're using your computer to interface with other computers, right?
Here's some more back story:
Some CAPTCHA protection systems can be bypassed without using OCR simply by re-using the session ID of a known CAPTCHA image. A correctly designed CAPTCHA does not allow multiple solution attempts at one CAPTCHA. This prevents the reuse of a correct CAPTCHA solution or making a second guess after an incorrect OCR attempt. Other CAPTCHA implementations use a hash (such as an MD5 hash) of the solution as a key passed to the client to validate the CAPTCHA.
Huh? That's the sexiest paragraph I ever read.
Moving right along...
Things have gotten so out control on downloading sites like Rapidshare, they've now made it even harder to figure out what the hell is going on.
On this one, not only do you have to identify the letters correctly, you have to be able to tell which ones feature a GD cat! That's right...some of the letters have dogs, others have cats.
Good luck with that.
Because I'm not a computer programmer, I can't think of any other way to prevent fraud on the internet. But this captcha crap has gotta go.
Whoever created this parody captcha clearly share my views:
ADDED: New readers! Be sure to check out my "Welcome Message"...comment often and have a look around the archives. Love ya.
3 comments:
I honestly think that a simple math equation (what is 2 +2?) is good or just a simple question like that.
What I don't understand is why they can't use real words? Why are they always some random group of letters placed together?
I love the way the people here interact and shared their opinions too. I would love to track your future posts pertaining to the said topic we are able to read.
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