Telling Humans and Computers Apart
If you’ve ever left a comment on someone’s blog or even if you’ve ever done business online (such as pay a bill, etc.) then you may have seen one of those weird little boxes with different sized letters and numbers in it prompting you to copy what you see in the space provided. While it may seem annoying as well as somewhat pointless at the time, you may be extremely thankful later-especially if you have your own blog. The weird letters and numbers are what is referred to as a CAPTCHA.
How Do CAPTCHA’s Work?
According to Wikipedia,
A CAPTCHA is a type of challenge-response test used in computing to ensure that the response is not generated by a computer. Because other computers are unable to solve the CAPTCHA, any user entering a correct solution is presumed to be human.
Coined in 2000 by Luis von Ahn, Manuel Blum, Nicholas Hopper and John Langford, CAPTCHA stands for Completely Automated Public Turing and works wonders when it comes to blocking out all of that unwanted spam. For many, CAPTCHA’s are great because it really helps to keep the spam count down. Some of the applications of CAPTCHAs, according to the main site include:
- Preventing comment spam in blogs
- Protecting website registration
- Protecting Email addresses from scrapers
- Online polls
- Preventing dictionary attacks
- Search engine bots
- Worms and spam
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