Les Jones: Word of the Day: Captcha

March 03, 2006

Word of the Day > Word of the Day: Captcha

From captcha.net: A captcha is a program that can generate and grade tests that most humans can pass, but current computer programs can't pass. For example, humans can read distorted text like that below, but current optical character recognition (OCR) computer programs have problems interpreting it:

Wikipedia gives this (presumably reverse-engineered) acronym: "completely automated public Turing test to tell computers and humans apart."

By using a captcha, the site owner ensures that a human being rather than a computer program is accessing the site. The system prevents bots from automatically interacting with the system and potentially abusing it. The example below is Blogger's captcha for preventing blog comment spam.

Previous WOTD: Ohrwurm

Posted by lesjones | TrackBack

Comments

Its a pain in the ass is what it is.

Sometimes its easy enough to read, but other times it gets to the point were I just forget about commenting because I can't figure out if the distorted figures are numbers or letters and what number or letter they actually are.

I guess comment spam is a problem for some folks with bigger daily readerships than mine, but I've never had a serious problem with it. Maybe blogger actually does a good job of keeping it off.

Posted by: countertop at March 03, 2006