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Monday, June 09, 2008

Are you human?

Interesting article.
Every web surfer, in the course of his or her browsing, has been forced to stop and perform this weird little task: look at a picture of some wavy, ghostly, distorted letters and type them into a box. Sometimes you flub it and have to retype the letters, but otherwise you don't think about it much. That string of letters has a name; it's called a CAPTCHA. And it's a test. By correctly transcribing it, you have proved to the computer that you are a human being.

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CAPTCHAS represents a race between programmers and spammers, with user in between. CAPTCHAS prevent spammers or hackers to create email account and indirectly reduce the number of spam we received in our email.

The most difficult CAPTCHAS I have seen so far is to choose letters that contains cats. Those letters are quite difficult since each letter has an animal on it and it is not easy to see whether it is a cat or something else since the picture of the animal is quite small. I have to try several times to get it right.

I wonder if CAPTCHAS is going to be more difficult in the future since spammers always able to find way to overcome CAPTCHAS.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

I agree. The cat ones are so difficult to see...

Hafiz said...

i think most humans have to try at least twice to get that right...at least, this will prevent spammers for a while :)