Technology has spawned many strange new words from blog to podcast to spyware. Captcha is a new term that you will be seeing more of in the coming months. In fact, chances are good that you have already dealt with captchas. A captcha is a scrambled mess of characters (like the ones pictured in this article) that we have to reproduce in a box before submitting a web form.
The purpose of captchas is to thwart bad guys from releasing programs (web bots) that can automatically fill out forms all over the web. They do this to leave spam on sites that allow comments or to send bogus orders to e-commerce sites. Captchas work well at stopping these hacker bots because they can't 'read' and verify these characters.
Like many other rules and regulations we have to follow, these safeguards start to infiltrate everything we do. Many Yahoo Mail users are feeling the pinch now as well. Yahoo recently instituted a policy that their email users verify a captcha before sending email to help thwart email bots from sending spam through their service. Like taking our shoes off at airports, it is an inconvenient by-product of living in the 21st century. A necessary evil, but how many evils do we have to tolerate?
