internet

More and more websites protect themselves from spam by using captchas, these twisted words we must re-type to prove we're human, not a machine.

More and more, these captchas are twisted, less and less we can read them, more and more it's irritable. And David Jeske, a technical director of Google, comments: "We know there's no perfect panacea, but we think this is a great tool to prevent malicious activity".

In Novembre 2005, the World Wide Web consortium published a paper informing that the captchas do not identify the human users correctly and can be thwarted by the intelligent programmers.

The workgroup noted, and that's my point, that some "spam companies" hire people to decipher captchas!
Could you imagine that? Cellars with tens of underpaid men, the eyes tired and continuously focused on 7 twisted characters that they must type on an old gray keyboard? Dark look and shining face, the whip waits for them if they do not reach their quota of captchas...

Fortunately, several Web sites explore new solutions, like audio captchas or simple enigmas. Good news for you, little captchator...

Source, because everything's true (except maybe the cellar) : The wall street journal online, beginning of the month.

For those who do not know:
A CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart, trademarked by Carnegie Mellon University) is a type of challenge-response test used in computing to determine whether or not the user is human. The term was coined in 2000 by Luis von Ahn, Manuel Blum, and Nicholas J. Hopper of Carnegie Mellon University, and John Langford of IBM. A common type of CAPTCHA requires that the user type the letters of a distorted image, sometimes with the addition of an obscured sequence of letters or digits that appears on the screen. Because the test is administered by a computer, in contrast to the standard Turing test that is administered by a human, a CAPTCHA is sometimes described as a reverse Turing test.

Labels: internet

(permanent link) @ 10:23 PM