CAPTCHA
From Encyclopedia Dramatica
You've noticed spam on the internet flooding from bots at some point or another, right? It's estimated that 99.9999% of all email is spam. How did it get this way? It's thanks to a little thing called the CAPTCHA.
In the old days, websites had intelligent limits based on IP addresses and heuristics and all that. Now, they just use CAPTCHAs. For what reason? God only knows because they're not stopping the spambots. FACT: No human has ever gotten past a CAPTCHA, ever, not once. Eventually the human just gives up, goes to The Pirate Bay, downloads XRumer, and has that program solve the CAPTCHA for them.
Contents |
Types of CAPTCHAs
ReCAPTCHA Version One (they changed it thanks to this article)
reCAPTCHA is a system that combines a human-unreadable CAPTCHA with a machine-unreadable word scanned from a book. When a website forces someone to get past a human-unreadable CAPTCHA, it holds a special place of hatred in the heart of each of its victims, but reCAPTCHA hopes to lessen this by turning CAPTCHA entering into a form of slave labour to digitize books. The CAPTCHA has to be entered correctly and whatever you type for the book scan, even if you type "nigger", they'll take your word for it and put it on an ebook somewhere.
You know it's a ReCAPTCHA and not some other system because you have a little box that visibly says reCAPTCHA, you have a circle button that allows you to refresh the CAPTCHA, and it always has two words instead of one. However on sites like last.fm, it lacks the refresh button or name "ReCAPTCHA" on it, but it still has the same exact style as ReCAPTCHA that you can recognize if you've seen ReCAPTCHA before. So you wonder how do you now which one is the CAPTCHA and which isn't? The CAPTCHA always has lines through it and is hard to read while the book scan never has lines and is easy to read. So then you get one, just hit the refresh circle until due to a software glitch, they accidentally make one that is human-readable for one word and for the other it has no line through it so it's a book scan.
Now enter the text with lines through it correctly as that's the CAPTCHA and then enter a completely incorrect word for the text with no lines. It doesn't have to be the same number of letters. It can be the word "On" and you just enter "nigger" and it'll take it and put in a book somewhere! Congratulations! You've gotten past the CAPTCHA and then just fucked up someone's scan of a book!
ReCAPTCHA Version Three
Version Two was just getting rid of the line through the words because "nigger" kept mysteriously showing up in ebooks. Version Three is where you solve it, then reCAPTCHA determines if you got it right and if you did, they give you code that you must copy and paste into another box. However this code never works and every website using ReCAPTCHA since then has simply stopped receiving new registrations.
Math CAPTCHA
Ordinary CAPTCHAs
 Your common MySpace CAPTCHA. |
 A friendly, welcoming CAPTCHA. |
 A typical Free Republic CAPTCHA. |
 Seen during Google signup. |
 Captcha-tan. |
 If all else fails... |
Wikis
Wikipedia and Wikia both use CAPTCHAs for registration to prevent vandalism. This actually works because most vandals (as opposed to Grawp) are too lazy to download a software to read the CAPTCHAs.
On some sites, every single step you make requires solving a CAPTCHA
MySpace is the typical example:
- Changing their password
- Registering a new account
- Sending comments
- Friend requests
- Logging in, even if the password is typed correctly.
- Modifying profiles
- Sending someone a message
- Calling 911
- Every time you click a page no matter what
