CAPTCHA challenges you to copy pointillist painter Seurat's classic A chap called Guy Abbott has created a CAPTCHA that asks you to take a swing at imitating pointillist painter Georges-Pierre Seurat. The CAPTCHA is available on the Contact Form on Abbott's site, which depicts an excerpt of Parade de Cirque, a painting in Seurat's famed pointillist style comprised of small dots of colour …
Am I alone in sometimes abandoning forms and forum posts just because the CAPTCHA is so stupidly useless that I can't be bothered?
Am I alone in finding that usually I have refresh the damned thing three or four times before I can even GUESS what letters or numbers it wants?
Am I alone in wishing that the idiots who use this technology would at least tell me if it's case sensitive?
I suspect that CAPTCHAs have become like copy protection schemes in the eighties and nineties - intensely irritating for end users, and useless against the people that you're trying to block.
I think you'll find that the ones that are bastard hard are the fault of the site admin. 4chan had the same problem because every post view called captcha. They rerwrote it to only call captcha when you clicked to post. This meant that the number of failed (including unanswered) capchas was considerably less than before, and they got easier because the success rate went up dramatically. I could find moot's post about it, but I've got to work.
I couldn't work it out. Well I could, but then I got quite worried.
I can't paint. I didn't try the flash-app - more out of laziness than having too much to hide ... But I have reported Kevin (above) to the authorities just to be safe - Because I already knew I couldn't paint.
So, as I am not an MI5 agent, MI5 agents must be able to paint. Either that, or I am a sleeper agent (which - although a bit of a worry - would be quite cool ... I wonder what my trigger word is?).
Anyway; this then made me worry why someone, who on the face of it is claiming to be persecuted by MI5, would only be reporting to the British Prime Minister respondents whom he had identified as not being MI5 agents?
And it was at this point I started to worry over my reporting of Kevin (above) - But there's no point worrying about what can't be fixed, is there?
And it was right about then that I really started to worry.
What does happen if you are able to pass the test?
I mean, every decent painter in the world can't be an MI5 agent, can they?! It might not be MI5 agents he's phishing for at all! It might be ... well I don't know - What kind of stuff do painters get up to? What kind of secret association might the person known only as Guy be looking to initiate?
I really was quite worried indeed.
Thankfully, much like Kevin (above), I don't run scripts and so not very much of the site worked ... But just to be safe I bought a new computer and buried the one I'd used to view Guy's site (I am obviously not putting where I buried it).
I'm now just left hoping that Kevin (above) hasn't shopped me!
"Please duplicate Madonna's Vogue gestures with your webcam"
"Please whistle Bohemian Rhapsody using your microphone"
"Give me your boots your clothes and your motorcycle"
Not to mention the TOS of sites will probably claim ownership of all your works.
I have a nasty feeling that rather than being just a weird captcha, this is actually a chap trying to make a political point with a 'copy this naughty word' in the second captcha. Which is fine, but may not be appropriate for the PR it's getting in these parts. (I'd have mentioned this via the comments system except I'm at work - catch22)
Will someone tell Yahoo Mobile's designers that putting a CAPTCHA hurdle between signing in for a new password makes the process unusable.
For a start the new CAPTCHA version has not only jumbled letters you have to enter but a swirling mass of other characters behind. Virtually impossible to read on a small screen. Do these people never test stuff for usability ?
Do these people never test stuff for usability ?
Of course. It's just the testers were unable to log on to the test system due to failing the CAPTCHAs, deadline was upon them, so they just released...
It's obvious, from all the ones I've done, that no-one's ever tested them on anyone with less than perfect vision.
Then again, I've tried a few of the audio ones, and despite having perfect hearing and only 5% of average sight, I still use the visual ones.
Huh? Just kidding, I fully agree, the CAPTCHA, can barely remember how to spell it let alone read one, is total BS. You're right, there has to be a better way to prove you're not a machine, I like the idea of humor, I hope that still sets us apart from machines.
1. This will really piss off humans more than lame Catchas, so you get less quality traffic too!
2. OCR can already beat Catchas, and a bit of smart image processing code would probably beat this too; anyone with a botnet will probably laugh at this soon.
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