Coming Soon: A Better Captcha
By Anna Johnson on June 1st, 2009Will bots or scripts ever hack the ‘captcha’ devices that Internet owners use to stop them from spamming their websites? The consensus seems to be no. In this area, at least, website owners appear to be winning against spammers.
‘Captchas’ are the squiggly words or series of letters and numbers you may be asked to type in when filling in an online form. The idea is that automated programs can’t read or hear the words, letters or numbers, so only human beings will be able to type in the correct code and submit the form.
While there are primitive captchas around, i.e. that are nothing more than a series of letters or numbers, Google for one is testing more creative captchas that integrate with the theme of a given website or are just more… fun!
One of the most effective captchas is called recaptcha and was developed by Dr Luis von Ahn, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University. It requires people to type in two words and, for the hearing impaired, offers audio clips of phrases from old radio shows.
Recaptcha is used by 120,000 websites including Facebook, Twitter, Craigslist and other high profile sites.
Want to use it on your websites? Good news, it’s free.
You can get it by visiting Recaptcha
Source: Anne Eisenberg, “New Puzzles That Tell Humans From Machines,” The New York Times, May 23, 2009
