Am I the only one that has been having trouble lately with "WORD Verification? Maybe it's because I'm running into it more now that I'm in the blog world. I don't know, but I have to say I have just a couple of issues with these necessary annoyances. First of all, they're rarely words so why do they call it word verification? And are they case sensitive or not? Sometimes they are and sometimes they aren't, what's up with that? Blurry backgrounds, characters all running together. Lines slashed across the whole thing. Is that a capital "B" or a "3" getting real cozy with that lower case "d" next to it? Who the hell knows? Give it a shot, place your bets, cross your fingers, close your eyes and press "Submit". Sorry, no winners this time. Here's another unintelligible picture, call Tom Hanks and give'er another try. You might just find the Holy Grail.
Word verification is part of a group of security tools called CAPTCHA which stands for Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart. They were developed by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University. The Wikipedia entry says "A CAPTCHA involves one computer (a server) which asks a user to complete a test. While the computer is able to generate and grade the test, it is not able to solve the test on its own. Because computers are unable to solve the CAPTCHA, any user entering a correct solution is presumed to be human." I certainly understand the need for these things. I know that email accounts, blog comments, concert ticket sales, etc are besieged and flooded by automated spamming all the time. I hate spam. Spamers are vermin who should be dragged into the street, stripped naked and slapped silly. I'm not suggesting these threshold guardians be done away with. I'm just asking for a fair shot at solving the puzzles because I also hate the idea that there's a computer out there somewhere that's presuming I'm not human. And it's laughing at me.
