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In One Domain, Anyway, Man Still Conquers Machine

CAPTCHAs, where humans distill words from squiggles, hold line in spam war

By Nick McMaster, Newser Staff

Posted Jun 9, 2008 4:53 PM CDT

(Newser) – Every web user has come across CAPTCHAs: wavy-lettered depiction of words you must retype as text. Most pay them no mind, but, Lev Grossman writes in Time, we should reflect upon completing one. They're one of the rare visible skirmishes in the largely invisible war between spammers and security programmers. But besides that, they are quite literally tests of our humanity.

CAPTCHAs (an imperfect acronym for "completely automated public Turing test to tell computers and humans apart") work on exploiting things computers can’t do, and so are constantly being compromised. Spammers’ programs can read many of the simple graphic-text CAPTCHAs, so, Grossman writes, they "might soon involve identifying animals or listening to a sound file—anything computers aren't good at. (What's next? Tasting wine? Composing a sonnet?)"

Rapidshare's latest captchas involved pictures of cats. ((c) Visentico / Sento)

CAPTCHA ((c) plindberg)

Rapidshare's latest captchas involved pictures of cats. ((c) sebastiankippe)

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In One Domain, Anyway, Man Still Conquers Machine

CAPTCHAs, where humans distill words from squiggles, hold line in spam war

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OTHER STORIES ON OUR RADAR

email • spam • Carnegie Mellon University • computer security • cybercrime • web email accounts • CAPTCHAs

MOST POPULAR STORIES

[ By Views ]

[ By Comments ]

More Newser Stories

NY Times Mistakenly Sends Email to 9M People

It was apparently just a miscue, not spam

Spammers Actually Deliver What You Order

Researchers surprised credit cards weren't abused

Finally! Study Discovers Way to Kill Spam

3 financial companies control most spam-prompted card payments

Beware of Links Promising Photos of Dead bin Laden

Unless, you know, it's a link to a Newser story on the topic

Spam Levels Plummet Worldwide

Spam down to a quarter of August levels as botnets go quiet

About Us

Site

Newser By Users

Community

Site Maps

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More News

What is Newser?