The Cheezy Blog

I was reading in The Register today about a form of CAPTCHA (that’s Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart, otherwise known as the worlds most forced acronym) that’s different to the common one of a box of hard to read text that you have to send back with the form before the data will be accepted, much like this very blog uses. The “big idea” is that instead of having to do something difficult, like decypher a horrible string, the user just has to click on a series of images. The example given is kittens, hence the name, but you could use it for anything.

This is all very well, but the reason I’m posting is because, I really don’t think this is a new idea. When implementing this blog’s CAPTCHA, I experimented briefly with the idea of showing inanimate objects such as a boat, a ball, a car or something, then getting the user to type in what they saw. Of course this isn’t very robust, a determined bot could get past such a system in seconds, but the point of it wasn’t to be robust, but to prevent casual robots. More to the point, this so called “new system” is completely reliant on the number of animals or objects or whatever you go for to set how many possible combinations there are, and if you use too many you make the whole test just as hard as those horrible word boxes to begin with!

I may have to do my own experiments into CAPTCHA again in the near future.