Captcha codes are the illegible jumbles of letters and numbers you sometimes see on websites when signing up or signing in. They’re sometimes quite annoying and can be far too hard to read. Someone asked me earlier what the point of them is so I’ll post the answer here on Technokratos.
You get these things called bots crawling the Internet. A lot of these bots are good. For example, Google’s own bots will scan the web for websites and then include them on appropriate results pages for keyword searches matching that site’s content. But there are bad bots. Very bad bots which spread viruses.
These bots automatically sign up to a website over and over again and then control the accounts it makes without the need for human interaction. It spams people with links to dodgy websites. Some people are ignorant enough to click the links, and end up infected with a virus, hacked, or sensitive data stolen.
Captcha codes stop bots from signing up. Most of them can’t read the jumbled up numbers and letters without human interaction and are thus prevented from creating spam accounts. So Captcha codes do come in handy. Even though they can be bothersome at times, they’re keeping your digital life secure.
The good news is that there has been experimentation with a new kind of Captcha codes. A 3D image is shown and the user must select what the 3D image represents from a list of possibilities. This is both easier for humans but harder for bots. Sometime soon, this kind of Captcha code will probably dominate.
For the time being try not to get too irate when you have to make several attempts at guessing what those illegible alphanumerical messes actually read. They’re doing you a favour at the end of the day. When more news on the future development of Captcha codes arrives I’ll be sure to let you know!
0 comments:
Post a Comment