CAPTCHA

A CAPTCHA (/kæp.tʃə/ kap-TCHA, a contrived acronym for "Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart")

I hate those cute little tests, especially when I fail them.

Though it is the company's loss, not mine because they missed a sale.

I find a great many computer security measures to be pointless.  For example, I have encountered restaurants located in the middle of nowhere with public access to WiFi advertised. Then I find I need a password. Why?  

As for CAPTCHA, yes, often I walk.  It just isn’t worth the effort.

John said, "For example, I have encountered restaurants located in the middle of nowhere with public access to WiFi advertised. Then I find I need a password. Why?  

So you can make a pass at the waitress by asking her for her password?

What I found most interesting about the video is how CAPTCHA is being used to train google's AI.  

It's little things like this that point the way to what google is working on and what they are giving SEO value to.   For example, accurate alt text and file names in images have had a huge amount of SEO value these last few years - the same few years the company has been mega-focused on training their image recognition system.  The same few years they started focusing their CAPTCHA on images instead of text.

I've gotten the image one wrong on several occasions and it lets me through just fine.

Although this latest nocaptcha system is interesting.  I wonder what it teaches us about the future.  

Lots of my day-job work for many years has focused on ensuring accessibility to information (including and especially digital information) for people with disabilities. Viewed from that perspective, the whole CAPTCHA issue becomes even more of a snake eating it’s own tail situation. It goes like this: If I have some type of visual impairment, then a visual-based CAPTCHA becomes difficult to impossible and I need assistive software to solve it. However, the hooks for that software are then exploited by CAPTCHA-breakers, so the CAPTCHA has to be changed to stay ahead of that. Which requires a new accessibility hook. Which gets exploited. And we go round and round and round until someone throws up.

Or, of course, they just don’t think about accessibility, because pfft, why would blind people need the internet. Aaaarrrrrrrrgggghhh.

All this is just one more reason this ornery, decrepit flatulence feels more and more like a luddite. I've bailed on many sites, when I've seen captchas, without even trying, just because I refuse to jump through their truly stupid hoops, to shop, browse, hunt for info, or for entertainment. This video reinforces that, for me...

Get off my lawn, ya rotten kids!!