[ Thursday, August 18, 2005 ]One thing that I've learnt todayStarbuck [19:07] Comments: 0 []  Is that the distorted collection of numbers and letters that one is often asked for after forgetting your webmail password a few times is called a CAPTCHA ("completely automated public Turing test to tell computers and humans apart"), a kind of reverse-Turing test to prove that you're a human rather than some scumbot trying to dictionary-search your password. Good for preventing automated creation of free email accounts, or blog comment spam for that matter.Being the boring man I man, I was looking at an interesting report written back in 2003, Verifying the Presence of Humans: Three New CAPTCHAs. Particularly like the java applet What's Wrong With This Picture...  But as this fellow proves with his captcha decoder PWNtcha ("Pretend We?re Not a Turing Computer but a Human Antagonist"), there's still a lot of breaking going on for the alphanumeric varieties... Personally, I'm so paranoid online that I sometimes hide bits and pieces of logins and passwords in amongst various junk-type in a Notepad window before ligating them in the form fields via highlight/copy/pasting... Which is one reason why I wish I could be shot of my now-redundant BG (before-Gmail) Hotmail accounts. I can't shut them down as - very occasionally - something useful still comes through. But the damn thing doesn't even allow my preferred password (I try to prefix all of my different passwords with a regular 9 character block of alphanumerals). So there you go. That's what I've learnt today. But I didn't say it was going to be interesting. 27 AUGUST UPDATE: And I now see that Blogger now allows blog-owners to use captcha's for their Comments... 0 Comment(s):[ Click HERE for the VSX front-page... ] |
[ Previous Posts ] Writing about writing Earwigging Music to move you Kubrik2001 Search engine secrets Robin Cook RIP Wedding bling Random views Evilutionary Planarity [ Full Archives ]
www.flickr.com
This is a Flickr badge showing public photos from Starbuck Powersurge. Make your own badge here.
|