The Times has an article about how computer techies are developing such sophisticated software that they’re now increasingly able to fool the ‘captcha’ tools we fill out at various sites.
Captchas are those annoying widgets that ask you to type in a squiggled word or series of letters in order to prove that you’re a real live person and not some spambot trying to break through a security layer or to fill a comments forum with spam. We actually use them at TPMmuckraker to keep spam out of the comments.
This interested me because I’d already seen signs that technology was overcoming these captcha programs, but in a funny way.
Of late, I’ve had several captcha fill-ins I was asked to type in where I actually had a difficult time figuring out what the letters were. And I’m human. Really.
Have you had this too?
Late Update: TPM Reader PHB has some additional thoughts on this matter at his blog. And he actually seems to understand the technology.
Later Update: Here’s Microsoft’s new approach. You have to determine which pictures are cats and which are dogs.
