Friday, April 17, 2009

CAPTCHA

Whats CAPTCHA? Whenever you fill an online form you come across a small image which is very not easy to read and you have to recognize and type them in the form to successfully submit the form. This is actually a CAPTCHA. The wikipedia definition says captcha is a type of challenge-response test used in computing to ensure that the response is not generated by a computer. This is done mostly to prevent crackers to automatically run scripts to submit the online forms, thereby bring down the resources of the host. It is a kind od security service. Captchas are most common in email registration, blogs when you post comments, banking applications and other sigin features. But this is sometimes horrifying to many users because they have to recognise the text and enter them everytime. Also in some sites such as banking captchas are too difficult to read. Though they are hard to crack by text recogniton software, they frustrate the users. The user need to refresh to get another image. I have even seen images which has to be typed case sensitive and it becomes even more difficult. Arent there any other way to prevent these issues. Lets wait n watch.

4 comments:

Varunkumar Nagarajan said...

CAPTCHAs are meant for distinguishing intelligent humen n stupid machines... there are so many alternatives to this buddy... one pretty straight one cud be given a figure (say Dog) and ask users to enter its name...

Varunkumar Nagarajan said...

Check out this as well -- http://blogoscoped.com/archive/2009-04-19-n82.html

Unknown said...

Dont worry, CAPTCHA's are important part of any signup or commenting system today given the explosive presence of spambot networks. People are finding new ways to avoid bots. one such is what @varun mentioned.. there is no escape!

Tom Praison said...

@Varun
Thanks for the wonderful piece of information
@Kunday
Ya I definitely agree to you. But it becomes frustrating when they are difficult to recognise by human eyes