CAPTCHA Madness? at Paintbits

I’m pretty sure not everyone knows what the term CAPTCHA means. On the other hand I’m almost sure everyone rans into a CAPTCHA form sooner or later.
Captcha Genious
Yes… this is MADNESS!

“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.”

In simpler words… it exists to piss you off.

CAPTCHA is then a little form with one or more questions (normally with one or more images) in a webpage requiring some form of authentication, trying to separate humans from computer scripts to decrease spam. Not that computer spam is worse then pure human spam, but at least you avoid the one with the highest IQ.

Because humans are like virus, creating new diseases to spread over the Internet, every time more and more sophisticated, the early implementations of CAPTCHA are no longer effective today. CAPTCHA have become one of the major pains in the ass in the Internet of today. In a time where everyone talks bout accessibility and usability it’s fun to see how can CAPTCHA still be used. I Know SPAM is mean, it gives you that extra work cleaning all those “Enlarge you Penis” or “Buy our Insurance” messages… But I really don’t know what is worse, that or having to tell apart cats from dogs behind some wierd letters… Really, there must be another way…

CAPTCHA in the wild

Rapidshare new CAPTCHA system is without a doubt one of the finnest…

Rapidshare CAPTCHA
Now 4 cats… Hmmm… Is that a Cat? Oh no… it’s Batman.