Unreadable CAPTCHAs
CAPTCHA stands for Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart. While the name of it might sound complicated, the purpose of it is quite simple. It is simply a test to tell apart humans and bots. Many websites that use it or used it in the past, for example, RapidShare. RapidShare itself is a very popular file hosting service, which ranks among the top 50 websites on the Internet. Rapidshare had some problems with spammers and bots that were trying to automatically download many files. This resulted in high bandwidth costs for Rapidshare, so the company had to make some steps to stop it. Last year RapidShare introduced a CAPTCHA that in order to download any file you needed to decipher. It was a CAPTCHA that had animals on each letter, and you needed to be able to tell on which letters cats are present. It was very hard to tell, as is was simply impractical. Many people were forced to download their files during “happy hours”, when you could download files without such nuisances. That is simply because they were not able to decipher the CAPTCHA. I think that this proves that while there certainly is a need for CAPTCHAs, we should remember to design them in such a way that all humans should be able to pass the test.
December 13th, 2011 at 7:37 pm
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