CAPTCHA Demystified

Thanks to our friends at Intel, Irina and editor Kevin flew to Portland where not only did they get to tour the top secret chip-making labs (no cameras allowed) but they met some disprutive tech guys in the realm of CAPTCHAs. You may not know what a CAPTCHA is, but were pretty sure youve used one or two or three. OK, so if someone asks you whats a CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart) and you wanna sound annoying and smart just say, Its a reverse Turing test. Hee. Basically, its a way for the computer to tell if youre a human or a bot to prevent comment spam on blogs (or on YouTube, etc) or, more importantly, to prevent bots from infiltrating consumer sites. Since the average failure rate of traditional CAPTCHA technolgy is about 20 percent, bots can mess up a lot of shopping. Weve heard that Ticketmaster loses as much as 12 percent of their sales to potential ticket buyers who drop out because they cant get past the CAPTCHA. So, if you can ignore Irinas combover hairstyle in this episode, we check in with the guys from Vidoop and hear what they have to say. Oh yeah, this subject would not be complete without referencing a little Blade Runner and the Voight-Kampff test.

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• computer
• captcha
• artificalintelligence
• AI
• getv
• irinaslutsky
• portland
• vidoop
• bladerunner
• replicant
• bot
• robot
• spam
• ticketmaster
• spamblocker
• michaelarrington
• techcrunch
• arrington
• mikearrington
• irina
• slutsky
• kiddie
• trannyshack
• geeks

[umagarandyorton619]

Oh, and 0:41 WHAT THE FUCK, HOW IN HELL AM I SUPPOSED TO TYPE THAT SHIT?

[umagarandyorton619]

0:39 WTF FU <-----The Captcha said it, not me.

PS: I had to type a Captcha to post this...

[PianoScience]

Thanks for calling her a retard Google. jk ;D

[dbw16d]

In dyckisic and have no prob with them

[Nixom1334]

Captchas dn't take into consideration dyslexics like me. the audio ones are just as impossible to understand

[CambridgeHeights]

@C0LL1N The letters are backwards, bent, and out of shape so that computer programs cannot recognize them. That's the point of them.

[C0LL1N]

it wouldnt bee so hard if the letters werent backwards and bent EXTREMELY out of shape and spelling stupid made up words like 'Ommagatritonpoopertings' and 'supercalifragilistiexpiolodot­iantionsing'

[dneuwir]

@Cinj216: There already are laws against spamming. The problem is that 99.9% of spam is NOT directly sent by spammers. It's sent by compromised systems infected with "bots". Innocent person "a" manages to get a Trojan on their system. Then hacker "b" uses person "a"s system to send out 50,000 spams without their knowledge. CAPTCHA isn't designed to prevent spamming others. It's designed to prevent automated "bots" from accessing or entering data on a web site.

[Cinj216]

Fuck CAPTCHAs. This is like punishing legit people for the spam and bullshit that other people do. I agree that something has to be done to block spammers, and there are some CAPTCHAs that are okay, but most are near unreadable and are more trouble than they're worth. Personally, I would much rather that they came up with strict laws against spam, then terminate the ISP accounts of all who are proven to be spammers and restrict them from getting another internet account.

[bajesus666]

they should put these in the NY times, next to the crosswords