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A Dispatch

« Macs Finally Getting ECrook Respect | Main | So Many Dumb Articles and Papers »

March 03, 2008

CAPTCHA Right Back Atcha

As technology employed by spammers for electronically deciphering CAPTCHA images improves (so they can do things such as sign up for tons o' free email accounts or spam the crap out of blog comments), CAPTCHA images try to make themselves increasingly difficult to read...especially for humans. Check out the following nightmare I encountered while trying to report a security issue at a Brazilian (Portuguese) site:

Impossible to read CAPTCHA

Are those two "u" characters in the middle or a "v" and a "u"? Unless you guess correctly the first time, you won't get a second chance. The replacement image for the next try has different characters to misread.

If good guys and bad guys keep fighting this battle, we humans may be better off reverting to foot messengers and smoke signals for their speed and convenience.

Posted on March 03, 2008 at 09:03 AM