Random Funky Numbers

What do you call the pictures on webpages that have those random numbers that are all different shapes and sizes. They are used when you login to somethin so a computer can’t just keep randomly guessing passwords without entering that number… i think. Anyways does anybody know the name of this and where I could find a tutorial for it?

CAPTCHA. It stands for "Completely Automated Public Turing-test to tell Computers and Humans Apart.

Of course, it’s not really a Turing-test per se, but they wanted the acronym to sound all cool. “We CAPTCHA’d him!” It’s not even a very good acronym to begin with.

I love those. I always imagine that there’s a machine at the gate, scanning my retinas (like in Minority Report) or maybe checking my “bio-stats” like those handheld Star Trek thingies did.

Those CAPTCHA things are so a system knows you’re human. Spambots can’t read those sequences… yet.

But they will… someday. :eek:

Robin

Actually, the bots are able to read a few of them already with basic OCR technology, so they’re not infallible.