So, it seems that submitting comments anonymously or commenting at all is not what it used to be. In these times of furious blogging and social networking sites popping up all over the place, not to mention the amount of bots running rampant, we have to implement the technology known as the “captcha”. I for one, was not a big proponent at first but now I see the futility.

The term CAPTCHA (for Completely Automated Turing Test To Tell Computers and Humans Apart) was coined in 2000 by Luis Von Ahn, Manuel Blum, Nicholas Hopper and John Langford of Carnegie Mellon University. At the time, they developed the first CAPTCHA to be used by Yahoo.

The one blog that I frequent on a daily basis uses “captchas”. It’s a common place nowadays. Captchas is that text or texts you see in the rectangular box that you need to decipher then type it in and press submit to get your comment posted. These “texts” items ensure that you truly are a human and not some bot trying to spam the crap out of the site. Yes, they are annoying because some times they are barely identifiable but they do have benefits.

Recently, One of the sites that I comment to often, implemented this technology. While, typing away and trying to figure out these random texts, I came across a few that I found peculiar since the texts that are found in “captchas” are generated randomly. These words come from books that are currently being scanned from large repositories so that we can have them available digitally. Yet, sometimes the computer or the OCR program can’t read the text correctly and that’s where we humans come in. We decipher and send them back. So yes, we are smarter than the computer….sometimes.

Enough with my boring information blogging.

What a great name for a band

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