Are you human?
This question was posed to me recently this week. Not by my mother or father or sister or brother. Not by my coworkers or managers or guy at the Chick-fil-a drive through. I was asked by a COMPUTER! Ironic right?
If you’ve spent any time on the web you’ve noticed those pesky little boxes at the end of any form you fill out online, any article you submit on a site, or sometimes even after you try and make a purchase online. You know what I’m talking about. The wonderful boxes that display a random group of text and symbols mixed in with colors and lines and blurred items (so you can barely read the text) that ask you to type what you see. How am I supposed to type what I see when I can’t figure out what I see? (Thankfully, Digg does an amazing job with their readability like the one above.)
So I learned today they are called CAPTCHA — Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart. If you recall the Turing test is the test designed to tell if a machine / computer has achieved a certain level of intelligence. You can read more about them here (I’d encourage it, b/c it’s interesting for sure). According to sources “most humans can solve them” – that doesn’t bode well for me since I always struggle to read them.
So basically what we have here is a computer testing a human to make sure they are human with a test that was designed by humans to test computers to see if they are at human intelligence levels or not. Weird. Ironic. Annoying.
While I understand their purpose in trying to prevent automated software from abusing their site (by either spamming or using resources), I still dislike them. The end.
Before going please comment on my post, but before you do I need to ask one last question:
Yeah — now maybe you get my point?
