The CAPTCHA
Friday, May 28th, 2010Here’s something for you noncomputer geeks.
OK, maybe that’s an assumption. Maybe you’re knowledgeable in all things computer but don’t know this little gem. Or perhaps you barely know how to turn your PC on but know the exact meaning and spelling of this topic. Either way, you probably have run across this big boy at some point.
And I digress yet again. Here it is:
Captcha. Or more correctly, CAPTCHA.
What the … ?! Um-hmm. It’s a real word. Really, it’s a loose acronym for Competely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart (or so says Wikipedia).
It sounds like capture. It frustrates many an Internet scammer and frequent Web surfer alike. And it’s brilliant. So what is it?
Some CAPTCHAs are discernible, some not so much (photo: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a7/KCAPTCHA_with_crowded_symbols.gif)
It’s that box with the warped letters and numbers, the one that you’re supposed to look at and figure out what those twisted letters and numbers are and then type them into another box, with the hope that you’ve got them right. If so, you move on to the next screen, you pass go. If not, you try again or get blocked from further attempts.
Granted, there are a lot of technical details that go along with the CAPTCHA, but this isn’t the forum for those details. Just know that I learned something today and I hope that I have been able to share a little somethin’-somethin’ with a Bloody Well Write reader or two.
Now, go and try to decipher one of those suckers.
Happy trails!
SAK
