Tag: CAPTCHA

At times, fighting with multiple CAPTCHA codes is more painful than having to hear "Party in the U.S.A." playing on the radio for the umpteenth time in a single day. I understand the point of a CAPTCHA, but there have just been too many times where the squashed, skewed letters are far too mangled to comprehend. Enter Solve Media, who think they've got a solution which is not only superior, but ...

Like spam filters, Captcha is one of the necessary evils of the Internet. Google's Captcha is consistently irritating for me. I routinely fail it at least once, sometimes twice in a row, and I'm not a robot (to the best of my knowledge). Google bought reCAPTCHA a while back, and it's nicer (and helps a good cause), but they still seem to be using their older, super-irritating Captcha in many ...

Yahoo! hosted their third annual Hack Day this weekend, which basically consists of a ton of hacker/developers hanging out at Yahoo!'s Sunnyvale campus for 24 hours while consuming lots of pizza and trying to write interesting code. The results? A bunch of geeky mashups between one service and another. But there are a few projects that caught my eye. Will Duff created a What You See is What You ...

CAPTCHAs are becoming both ubiquitous and useless. When you visit many web sites, you have to decipher some tough-to-read text and enter it in a box before you can leave a comment or send an email. But hackers are getting better and better at developing automated systems to crack CAPTCHAs, which means that you have to squint at the screen for nothing. But some researchers at Penn State ...

Looking for a way to post your email address online, but don't relish the idea of spambots picking up your address and sending you email ads for Viagra and anatomical enhancement pills? ReCAPTCHA Mailhide provides a simple tool for obscuring your email address. All you have to do is enter your email address (and hope that the folks behind Mailhide aren't doing anything nefarious with it), and ...

Have you been so busy sending angry letters to Saturday Night Live about their choice of actors to portray Barack Obama that you've fallen behind on your Download Squad reading? Not to worry. Here's a roundup of some of the stories you might have missed this week: Download Squad at Future of Web Apps Download Squad's Grant Robertson hit up the Future of Web Apps 2008 conference in Miami this ...

The end is nigh. Days after the Windows Live Mail CAPTCHA system was cracked by spammers, reports state that the Gmail CAPTCHA system has fallen as well. CAPTCHA stands for Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart. Ever signed up for an email or forum account, and been required to enter in a group of characters? That's a CAPTCHA system. Folks are calling this ...

You know those annoying "please enter the code" requests you see when signing up for online services, leaving blog posts, or otherwise trying to prove that you're human and not a machine? Yeah, it turns out that the machines are getting pretty good at reading them too. The basic idea behind the CAPTCHA (which stands for Completely Automated Turing Test To Tell Computers and Humans Apart is that ...

If you've had a blog for any length of time, you've probably been assaulted with blog comment spam. Users of WordPress have the fantastic Akismet spam filtering tool freely available to them by Automattic, the makers of WordPress. But while Akismet is good (really good), it's not perfect. If you have been using Akismet, but are still seeing too many spam messages slipping through, consider ...

CAPTCHAs. You've probably seen them. They're those little boxes that show you a picture with some letters and numbers. You're supposed to type those characters in a box to prove that you're a human leaving a comment on a blog post or news website, and not a spambot. CAPTCHA stands for "Completely Automatied Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart." And since most websites don't have ...