If you are trying to submit some stuff -- text or picture or whatever -- to a website, this guy, who has been deployed by that website, would want to know if you are really a human being or some sort of an automated software.
So, to test you, he will toss some jumbled letters or figures or a mixture of both, and he would want you to enter them into a small box, in the same order you see them.
But sometimes, he thinks he is too smart, and doesn't make it legible enough for me to read. If computers weren't so much of an inevitable part of our existence, I would have just told him, "Hell with you. I got better things to do in life", or something even worse.
But I have no option, and I pray, for the task to be an easy one.You know, he is arrogant too: he himself is not a human being, and expects us to be one!
By the way, his real name is: Completely Automated Public Turing Test to Tell Computers and Humans Apart.
Big deal.
He can throw up some crazy stuff at you as well, as one person, who goes by the Twitter handle @emilysaysso, discovered a few days ago. On the Bank of America website, Captcha threw up a combination of letters that had a four-letter expletive in it. It was not only spelt correctly, there was a "y" in the beginning, and "u" in the end. Don't say that aloud!
I am not kidding.
Bank of America is now adding a profanity filter, after this incident. This was the bank customer's tweet; and you can read about the incident here.
What goes around comes around. Captcha is getting a taste of his own medicine. The latest is that artificial intelligence-trained software can fool him too. Read about it here.
Captcha, don't think you are all that smart!
(This blog entry is a part of the "Blogging from A to Z Challenge April 2018"