We have all experienced how frustrating CAPTCHAs can be. Remember when you are bout to submit a form online or you are about to request something and the command pops up – “Click here to show that you are not a robot” or “Solve this equation 9 + 2” or “Click on all the photos that have a street sign below”. It stirs up my bananas as I’m sure it does yours too. But if website owners know that visitors do not find these CAPTCHAs amusing in the least bit, then why do they persist with it?
The word CAPTCHA is an acronym for “Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart.” The original system was developed in the early 2000s by engineers at Carnegie Mellon University to find a way to filter out the overwhelming armies of spambots pretending to be people (spambots are s a program designed to collect, or harvest, e-mail addresses from the Internet in order to build mailing lists for sending unsolicited e-mail, also known as spam).
The scientists devised a program that would display some form of garbled, warped, or otherwise distorted text that a computer couldn’t possibly read, but a human could make out. All a user had to do was type the text in a box, and access was theirs. The program was wildly successful. CAPTCHA became a ubiquitous tool and an accepted part of the internet user experience.
So unfortunately, CAPTCHA is a necessary evil in the computing environment we live in. We are sure that science and technology is sorry for the inconvenience, but it hopes you agree that having to type an extra word is preferable to having your phones and computer systems deal with excessive levels of spam.
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