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Will's Web Watch: Why I'm not in captcha rapture
If it looks like a B and it smells like a B, it must be an 8...

By Will Sturgeon

Published: Tuesday 10 April 2007

Tired of having to type out the letters before you on the screen to prove you're a human? So is Will Sturgeon. Let him explain his latest web annoyance...

I'm fairly web-savvy, in a pragmatic way. I shop, I bank, I shop some more online. I regularly read a handful of blogs. I even checked out Second Life for all of about two minutes before removing it from my laptop and trying to erase it from the memory.

I don't claim to be at the cutting edge of every new development yet I feel I have the right to consider myself pretty switched on to this whole interweb malarkey.

So it really grates when I find myself being in any way curmudgeonly towards the internet. In fact, one of the best things about using the internet outside of it paying the bills is the fact it allows me to avoid other areas far more deserving of my scorn - such as the high street (so much leisurewear and yet so many unhealthy-looking people).

Captcha strikes

However, there is one thing online that consistently bugs me. It's called 'captcha', though you may know it as 'those bloody boxes of bendy letters and numbers which I'm supposed to type to prove I'm real yet I can't even read the bloody thing'.

Captcha actually stands for Consistently Antagonising Process to Check Human Annoyance-thresholds, or words to that effect.

In case you've never seen one (though they've been around for years), here's what a captcha box looks like on Hotmail - complete with the obligatory error message which my efforts to interpret these things normally engenders.

Come on, is Microsoft really telling me that isn't a capital T between the N and the H?

Not convinced? Well what about this one then:

Seriously, Microsoft would have me believe that first squiggle is just a squiggle and isn't really the number 7 - and is that an S or a J at the end?

Testing times

Of course these are nothing new. Microsoft has been using captcha to prevent bots signing up for webmail accounts for some years now but seems to have recently added it to make people prove they are human when sending emails as well. Captcha is certainly growing in popularity (though not with me it isn't).

Just today I've come across captcha on Digg, Google, Hotmail and Ticketmaster.

Ticketmaster is particularly annoying (and not just because the company levies indefensible service and postage charges - £12.50 per ticket, are they sure?). If you're having to go back and forth between pages, trying to find the best seats, or trying to alternate dates to find available tickets you seem to get a captcha test at every turn.

Imagine doing your driving test but when you get to the obligatory eye-test where, rather than being asked to read the number plate of a stationary car, your examiner picks a series of moving cars with muddy number plates and you're getting close to how frustrating these boxes can be.

The idea is of course that these captcha boxes will prevent bots using services but it's been fairly common knowledge for some time that there are ways of exploiting captcha and workarounds for those who want to abuse systems or services. They probably put up a barrier to the opportunist, would-be abuser but offer little more practical protection than that.

So all they effectively achieve is annoying web users who just want to get on with whatever it is they were doing.

Rant over.