Tuesday, January 24, 2006

Keeps Cylons away.

Word verification prevents machines from commenting on my blog. (Centurions, maybe, they have poor typing skills. Boomer and Six comment all the time.)

What this does is to prevent automated systems from adding comments to your blog, since it takes a human being to read the word and pass this step.
So why does it have to be so fucking hard to type? Can a machine type "CAT"? Can a machine read "DOG" in the graphic? Does the word have to have eight letters with an r and an h stuck together?

The only explanation I have for this difficulty is that the programmers think it's funny. "Wait till they try to type THIS one! Haw haw! Hey, use that typeface that's hard to read! Oh, that's rich! Hee hee!"

Why does everything have to be so hard to do? Remember when technology made things easier?

11 comments:

Kathy said...

I fail this Turing test about 1/10th of the time.

Did you know that one of the ways sploggers get around the verification is by setting up porn sites and forcing the guys navigating the net with one hand to solve the captchas before they can look at the nekkid people?

It may be the first endeavor known to man that's actually powered by porn.

My captcha to post this: mhvdmijn

Shocho said...

I just do not fucking understand why (a) it has to be so many letters to type and (b) it has to be some loopy distorted typeface. Seems to me that since it's a graphic, it doesn't have to be distorted. I guess somebody has tech that scans the graphic looking for letters.

Regarding porn and it's power, I can't believe that I talked to a higher up at A Certain Company making a joke about, "Hey did you consider a porn site?" and the response was not laughter, but more like, "We considered that but the current providers are too entrenched." Ugh. Double ugh.

Shocho said...

I read up a little on Wikipedia, and there are indeed OCR programs that can scan poorly constructed captchas. I guess that's why it's gotta be smooshed and lots of letters. It's tough proving I'm a human being.

Brad said...

I think we all know why they don't use real words:

1- the cylons will use a random word generator and still post
B- Brad will mispell real words anyway, so it might as well be a jumble of words.

But I agree with the font thing - crazy. But I have seen some word verification images that have these stray lines going through them so that one has to stare real hard to figure out what the heck the letters are.

tscngprz - in a big fact comic font

Anonymous said...

Yeah, I'd imagine that the chosen font, plus some kind of transform applied (stretch, skew, rotate, scale) is enough to deter most OCR readers.

Regarding Kosmo's "strange lines", I've seen 'em too. They remind me of the back of Transformer blister packs in the 80s. Remember that red scrambled background with the blue lines that would show the Transformers' stats? You'd hold a transparent piece of red plastic over the mess to read it.

Google couldn't help me find a good pic of it unfortunately.

TheGirard said...

lol

Mine = gtgils

Got to Go I'm leaving Strat

Dave(id) said...

Some cool info about this at http://www.cs.sfu.ca/~mori/research/gimpy/

pemhuks

people eating my huge underground kumquat stash

Tom said...

All of that being said, why do you make everybody who comes to your blog do work so you don't have to delete one or two spam comments, and in turn, you have to do work at all of their sites to comment. These goofy things just mean that actually humans have to do a ton more work to make a comment than if the owners would just occasionally cruise though and delete the 1 spam post.

Of course, I was only getting 1 (or maybe 2) per post.

Tom said...

That was not aimed at you specifically scho, and was, in fact, a total threadjack.

Shocho said...

I'm changing the name of the blog to "I threadjack myself."

dfhgpztr

dog face horse gonads press zebras that ride

Shocho said...

Oh yeah, and in answer to your other question, I got a lot more than 2 or 3 of those hideous spam messages. Seems once they find you the wall breaks down and it's a deluge.

ddyqngx

drastic deer yank querulous nuns guarding xylophones

I hate typing these letters, but I love coming up with word verification poems...