We're now well into the world of "Web 2.0." If you don't know what that means don't worry, nobody will call you an idiot, at least not to your face. They'll do it over the internet thanks to "Web 2.0." It actually doesn't really mean anything. It's just a fancy buzzword used to describe the fact that the internet is now (and has been for several years) widely interactive. Unlike the early years of the internet, you no longer have to have your own website to have a voice on the web. You can now post your crappy band's songs, videos of you lighting your brother's sack on fire, and your inane, incoherent opinions on somebody else's website (much like I'm doing right now). Chances are that you've done one of those things, and chances are that along the way you've seen something that looks like this garbled pattern of monkey feces...
That's word verification, otherwise known as CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart...thanks Wikipedia). According to Blogger Buzz, "word verification is designed to be a simple puzzle that a human can solve easily but a computer cannot." It was created by a couple of guys, whose sperm are probably smarter than your cousin and I combined, at Carnegie Mellon University to protect against spam. It ensures that when you read an article online about McCain farting and Obama smelling it seven states away and condemning it as "the politics of the past," and you're actually brave enough to scroll through the comments section and stomach the babbling lunacy that ensues, that you won't be inundated with computer generated links to guaranteed male enhancement and local sexy girls dying to "meet" a guy like you. The perturbing part of this is that when you see in the comments section of a legitimate piece of journalism, a link guaranteeing to help you lose 40 lbs AND make your junk bigger, that was posted, purposely for that specific article, by an actual human being.
What's even more perturbing however, is when you come across one of these "simple puzzles" and you can't solve the damn thing. When it comes to the actual science of computers I know slightly less than nothing, but are these machines becoming so smart that we have to make these things look like this?
This is a "simple puzzle."
This looks like it was drawn by a five year old who just learned the alphabet and was given finger paint laced with acid. I couldn't write something this illegible if I was missing 1 1/2 eyes and having my face waxed.
By now you may be asking yourself "What's the point?" or "Why am I still reading this crap?" I don't really have a good answer for that. I guess the point is that they should make these things easier to read.
