We all know about those authentication blocks of text called CAPTCHAs, perhaps too well. (Today’s fun trivia: The acronym stands for Completely Automated Public Turing Test to Tell Computers and Humans Apart.). A new idea from PlayThru is to embed a small Flash or HTML5-based game that a human plays with a mouse to prove he or she really is a carbon-based life form. It is intriguing, potentially less annoying, and has captured (if you will excuse the pun) a few supporters already. The service is just getting started, and it is free to try out.
The CAPTCHA process was developed in 2000 by several computer scientists at Carnegie Mellon University. It has since spread like kudzu to various websites, where site owners try to prevent automated bots from bombarding their pages.
The original thought of Alan Turing with his namesake test was to develop some way for a human to tell when it was talking to a computer. The CAPTCHA is actually this process in reverse: It is administered by a machine, but tries to distinguish humans. It hasn’t been working all that well, though. Many spammers employ a variety of techniques to defeat them, such as by paying low wages to actual humans or running optical character recognition software to ferret out the
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