OzWebMasters

I’ve never minded entering those CAPTCHA numbers & letters if it means my accounts & data will be more secure, although some versions of it are too difficult, with lines running through them that make the correct answer too ambiguous.

Now it appears that spammers have developed software that can crack CAPTCHA more easily than you or I can work out what to type in. The good news (fingers-crossed) is that new methods will be developed that are not only easier for us to use, but harder (impossible?) for software to crack. Or to put it another way, if the software does crack it, spammers could make more money developing AI stuff.

A simple example is offering a picture of an animal, and asking us to choose what type of animal it is. Computers find it harder to recognise what a picture is than characters.

Here’s an interesting quote from the inventor of CAPTCHA:

“I heard that 60 million captchas are solved every day around the world, which first made me quite happy for myself but then quite sad,” he said. “It takes about 10 seconds to solve a captcha, so that means humanity is wasting thousands of hours solving them. I wanted to do something good for humanity in that time.”