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How Useful Is CAPTCHA?

By: Oleg

"CAPTCHA", which is trademarked the Carnegie Mellon University, is a short form for "Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart". It is a test, which helps the computer to differentiate between machines and human beings. It has the capability of creating and grading tests that automatically accepts all humans and rejects all machines.

The idea is that while as humans we can make out a series of distorted letters and numbers, a machine will not be able to make sense of such images. To learn more about how the program works you can visit http://www.protectwebform.com/. There is also a site for our more advanced version of the program at http://www.protectwebform.com/smartcaptcha.

Having a CAPTCHA installed can protect against bots, which are programs that can repeatedly spam inboxes, try to post and retrieve personal information in chatrooms, and also try to get e-mail addresses and other information to use for promotions to sell services or items, or sign you up for numerous free mail services.

The bots create worms that can cause immense harm to your machine. They crack your passwords, assault privacy and use your personal information for commercial use without your permission.

CAPTCHA is a sure shot way of preventing these bots from creating havoc. The CAPTCHA asks the user to recognize the distorted image of letters and numbers usually with a string over a ‘noisy’ background. While it is easy for a human to decipher it, the machine usually cannot. And, that is how CAPTCHA distinguishes between a human user and a computer. Various large and small sites find CAPTCHA quite useful. No wonder, you see them in mail services, banking sites, blogs, chat rooms and similar places.

Spammers send unsolicited messages in bulk to you inbox. These messages are not desirable at all. The most common kind of spam is email spam. However there can be other spam too in the form of usenet newsgroup spam, log spam, search engine spam, instamessaging spam and similar others.

Some advertisers think spam is a good way to go to get their message out to the masses. It doesn't really cost them anything other than finding lists of e-mail addresses to send to, so they send mass amounts of mailings, and there is nothing you can do about to stop it, because laws do not allow holding a sender responsible for the number of mailings they send on the internet.

Usenet spam is a message that can be sent to twenty or more Usenet newsgroups. This kind of spam is usually targeted to those people who visit and read the newsgroups but do not post anything or give any kind of address. This kind of spam inundates the newsgroups with unnecessary advertisement and posts. It also challenges the owner’s ability to accept and manage the topics on the system.

Another kind of spam, which is a little more expensive, is the instant message spam. In this case, advertisers have paid a little more to get a hold of a list of instant messaging ID's and then sent messages directly to those people.

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Oleg is an expert on CAPTCHA design and development. Click to learn more about his revolutionary new CAPTCHA Plugin technology.

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