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Is CAPTCHA Essential?

By: Oleg

A CAPTCHA or Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart is basically a kind of test that helps to distinguish a computer from a human being. It is under the trademark of Carnegie Mellon University. You can visit http://www.protectwebform.com/ for detailed information on CAPTCHA.

A CAPTCHA requests the user to take a test. Any user who provides the correct answer is considered to be a human. A very common instance of a CAPTCHA is to ask the user to key in letters from a distorted image. The sequence includes alphabets and numbers. If the user keys in the correct sequence, he is considered to be a human or else a machine. A smart CAPTCHA is pretty easy to implement. You can get the details from http://www.protectwebform.com/smartcaptcha.

Website owners have to guard against spammers yet they need feedback from the visitors to their site. Spammers are always on the look out to grab your email id and use it for various purposes without your permission. One option is that you can go in for automated programs, called bots, to let them scan your website and parse out your mail id.

Another option is CAPTCHA that does not allow the spammers to get access to your email ids. Many websites and sign-up pages use CAPTHCA. It assumes that computer programs cannot read distorted characters. It is considered fairly reliable.

CAPTCHA can be said to be a program that has the capability to create tests which only humans can clear. The program is a fully automated program and no human intervention is required. Thus it is so much preferred by website owners. CAPTCHA has become very popular in the past few years.

The key to CAPTCHA is using it to stop spammers before they ever get access to your email. Once they have it, you have lost the game and they will be regularly sending you spam emails you don't want.

CAPTCHAs not only prevent encroachment by spammers for commercial purpose, it also protects the systems that are gullible to spam like, the webmail services of Gmail, Hotmail, and Yahoo. They also help prevent automated postings on online blogs. There are some services which might allow automated use but within a limit. In such a scenario CAPTCHA helps in enforcing a usage policy and prevents any kind of deviation from the policy.

There have been numerous efforts at creating CAPTCHAs that are handier. Such endeavours usually include the use of JavaScript, mathematical questions (like "what is 1+1"), or simple questions requiring common sense (for instance "what color is the sky"). These attempts infringe on one or both of the philosophy of CAPTCHAs. Either they cannot be automatically created or they can be easily split given the condition of false intelligence. So, the only security these CAPTCHAs provide is safety through obscurity.

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The author, Oleg, is an expert on CAPTCHA design and development. Click to learn more about his ingenious new Smart CAPTCHA technology.

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