Rarr...Captcha!

Last week, those movie ticket kiosks were on my nerves.

But this week, I wanted to focus on those fun little images we all love to hate: Captcha.

You know them- the images you have to decode in order to sign up for a new account (basically to prove that you’re human).

This post is dedicated to you, little buggers, for making me feel kinda dumb sometimes.

Formally known as “”Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart,” captchas as we know them today are the product of crazy awesome people/researchers @ Carnegie Mellon, who came up with the crazy awesome (and long) term as well.

There are a variety of captchas out there, working to determine who is real and who’s a bot – I’m sure you’ve seen a few options, from text (words, phrases), object recognition (now in 3D), math, and other weird captchas.

Some captchas use their power for good (like reCaptcha’s goal of digitizing scanned texts) and others for evil (like trading captcha solving for porn).

Even though they’re frustrating and kindof annoying sometimes, I just think about how wild the Internet would be without them. Maybe my next rant of the week should be focused on those pesky bots.

In Summary: hey, I’m no Wolfram Alpha, but I matter too.