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Kill The CAPTCHAs

By Bud Kraus
bud@joyofcode.com
Joy Of Code
Creator And Instructor

v4 i13
Originally Published: Auguest 28, 2008

I can't resist using this platform to rant about something that falls right in the middle of my anger zone. I am sure it must bother a few JG Readers too.

My feelings go beyond garden variety hatred. I understand why we have CAPTCHAs, but that doesn't dispel my total fear and loathing of this horrific barrier on the web. Barrier is the operative word here as CAPTCHAs are designed to be just that.

What in the world wide web is a CAPTCHA? It stands for Completely Automated Turing Test To Tell Computers and Humans Apart.

You've seen them but, just in case you haven't come across one, here is a screen shot of a CAPTCHA that I took from craigslist.com.

CAPTCHAs are used on many web sites. You'll find them littering the social and business network sites (often referred to as Web2) such as digg, linkedin, facebook, twitter, and so many others.

A CAPTCHA (funny, it sounds like "gotcha" to me) ensures that a real flesh and blood human person is really entering data into a form on a web page rather than a computer program entering a sea of garbage data. The reason for using them is valid, but their use puts up barriers that are problems for too many people.

What a CAPTCHA ensures is that only a real human being can submit the data to the server. Assuming, of course, that he or she can read the distorted graphical text and correctly enter that information into the corresponding box.

YUK!!

Guess what I discovered this summer? Even non-visually impaired people (like my wife and kids) have a very hard time reading the graphical text. Good thing the CAPTCHA makers thought about that too, right? ......NOT!!

Just in case you can't decipher that the sample CAPTCHA reads "slus select," then you can opt for the audio alternative (when they offer one). If you can't see it, then you can hear it. That sounds reasonable, doesn't it?

Now here's the back breaker - the audio can be as hard to understand as the text is to decipher.

If you can't read the above CAPTCHA, try listening to the audio alternative. (As it turns out, this one is fairly easy to understand.) I've heard many audio CAPTCHAs that were impossible to understand given the deliberate distraction and background noise.

Don't get me wrong. I clearly understand why CAPTCHAs exist but I have to ask, "Isn't there a better way to prevent computer programs from entering garbage data into web page forms?" I guess not, but CAPTCHAs seem to prevent humans from filling out the forms too!!

But Do CAPTCHAs Have A Side Benefit?

Is there anything good I can say about CAPTCHAs?

No, but in preparing for this JG, I discovered something called reCAPCHA - an effort to make another (and hidden) use of CAPTCHAs.

Here's what I learned from their site:

"About 60 million CAPTCHAs are solved by humans around the world every day. In each case, roughly ten seconds of human time are being spent. Individually, that's not a lot of time, but in aggregate these little puzzles consume more than 150,000 hours of work each day. What if we could make positive use of this human effort? reCAPTCHA does exactly that by channeling the effort spent solving CAPTCHAs online into "reading" books."

So when you're entering the text of a CAPTCHA into the box, you're helping the digitization process.

I didn't know that either!!