Squigl-pix and ESP-pix are new CAPTCHA'S

As I wanted to find out more about Captcha, I went to Google and discovered that there Is even a website about it! The term Captcha, based upon the English word capture, was coined in 2000 by researchers from the Carnegie Mellon University.

CAPTCHA has to do with telling humans and computers apart automatically and it is a type of challenge-response test used mainly on the Web to make sure that a response is not generated by a computer. For example, humans can read distorted text on a graphic, such as the ones displayed on the right, but computer programs cannot.

ReCAPTCHA is a project to digitize books, which are scanned and run through OCR (optical character recognition). ReCAPTCHA sends words that cannot be read by computers to the Web in the form of CAPTCHA's for humans to decipher. So the words used by reCAPTCHA come directly from old books that have been digitized!

If you are interested in getting a CAPTCHA for your site, you should know that they are available from this site: reCAPTCHA project and they are:

• free
• useful
• secure
• accessible
• popular
• easy

Easy to install plugins and controls are available for several environments, like WordPress, MediaWiki, PHP, ASP.NET, Perl, Python, Java, and many others. To ensure that blind people can freely navigate web sites, reCAPTCHA also comes with an audio test.

Computer programs are getting smarter and smarter. Spammers and malware authors are able to break the Captcha process, so as a result, Captchas are getting harder and harder and maybe that is why people dislike them so much. They might be disliked, yet there are jokes that have been made about them: Top 10 Worst Captchas | IT Management and Cloud Blog

Rather than attempting to create a distorted background and high levels of warping on the text, a modern CAPTCHA might focus on making segmentation difficult by adding an angled line as shown on images on the right.

Another way to make segmentation difficult is to crowd symbols together. This is Yahoo!'s current CAPTCHA format. This might be difficult for some people to read, as seen in the example on the right (is it "klopsh" or "kbpsh"?).

New CAPTCHAs

They are being constantly developed in an effort to foil spammers, scrapers and bots.

SQUIGL-PIX

Gives you directions and asks you to draw lines around the correct pictures.

Tip: watch the direction you draw your lines and be careful that they meet at the end, otherwise you will fail the test!

ESP-PIX

This is a Captcha script that instead of asking you to type letters, requires that you look at a set of pictures and then select the word that best describes all the images. It is a way of authenticating ourselves as human!

Tip: it is important not to look at the pictures individually, but as a set.

Unfortunately, Captcha presents a major problem to users who are blind, have low vision, or have a learning disability such as dyslexia.

Making money with CAPTCHAS

It might sound unbelievable, but one can also make some money with CAPTCHAS! One site is called Pixprofit: pictures are life. The site is free to join and one has to retype the picture content into the input field in English. Payment is $1 for 1,000 pictures. They estimate that one could do up to ten pictures per minute, but I think that is slightly optimistic! The minimum amount for payment is $3, which can be made via PayPal or Webmoney and payments are daily and that is confirmed! The pictures vary greatly in nature and they can be just letters, just numbers or a mixture of both. Sometimes there are only 4 characters, others there are 7 or 8, but what comes is always a surprise!

Pixprofit digitizes books and papers. Another of their goals is to assist visually and hearing impaired people, so they can have access to the web resources they need.

Having fun with CAPTCHAS

If you like playing computer games, now you can also entertain yourself with captchas and the site is called Gwap.

• ESP game - They tell you to concentrate and one can see a bouncing ball while one waits for a partner. Then a picture comes and one must guess what it is to get a score.
• Verbosity game: it's common sense. One partner is a describer, the other a guesser, as you try to guess the secret word by giving clues.
• Squigl: ready, set, trace - You and partner see same image and word. By holding down the mouse, you both have to trace the object described by the word and you get points for matching the trace.
• Matchin: a question of taste - You and a partner are shown two images and you must choose the image you like the most.
• Flip it - Click on a tile to reveal image. The goal is to find pairs of similar images.
• Pop videostrong> - You and your partner see some video clip. Each enters words describing what you see and hear.