Most people have a love-hate relationship with the CAPTCHA. We love them because they keep people from spamming our sites (for the most part), but sometimes the make our eyes hurt and frustrate us as we try to figure out what exactly the garbled words say. Sometimes, you can’t even make them out and have try, time and again, to prove that you are human.
Today it might seem hard to remember what life was like before CAPTCHAs started being used by AltaVista and Yahoo in 2000. Back then, CAPTCHAs were designed to prevent automated chat bots and URL submissions. Despite their popularity today not many people know that CAPTCHA isn’t just a something that sounds cool (and kind of like “gotcha”). It’s actually is an acronym for “Completely Automated Public Turning test to tell Computer and Humans Apart”.
Here is something even more interesting than acronyms (yes, such a thing exists). With the billions of CAPTCHAs being jumbled around the web, you’re more than likely to come across one that’s either inappropriate, laugh-out-loud hilarious, or just down right confusing. We’ve compiled a list of the craziest ones we could find. Read on, and be thankful that your email wasn’t stuck behind one of these.
Facebook is always trying to assure us that it’s tough about it’s security, but maybe it’s being a little too tough with this CAPTCHA. (via Sophos)
The other day I was trying to post something for sale on Craigslist but could not get past the CAPTCHA on the final page. I just couldn’t unscramble it for the life of me. I had to click the refresh button three times before I stopped in my tracks to see a CAPTCHA in Hebrew. I suppose, not matching the alphabet of the site you are using is one way to thwart bots.
We move from religious profiling to the White House with the next CAPTCHA. The official White House website unfortunately pictured the above CAPTCHA which one Cisco engineer found while trying to send President Obama a message. A CAPTCHA creator explained that they do “heavy filtering to prevent offensive combinations,” but sometimes “things slip through.” This caption goes right from confusion to treason.
One BoingBoing reader’s patience was put to the test when he tried to post using the site’s DISQUS commenting system (the same one we use on Geek.com). The result was a slew of incredibly indecipherable CAPTCHAs. How many normal keyboards out there have a lambda key?
Beastie Boys fans may be wondering why exactly this CAPTCHA didn’t work. The computer is telling the user that it’s incorrect, but clearly, there is no better answer than the one provided. Perhaps Mix Master Mike can figure it out what went wrong?
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