Shake Hands with CAPTCHA

Does the word 'CAPTCHA' ring a bell? No? I can assure you that if you  browse net you must have definitely used CAPTCHA. CAPTCHA stands for Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart. Still not ringing any bells? Read on.

Remember, that word verification step at the end of an email account creation or an online transaction? Now that's CAPTCHA technology in action. In other words CAPTCHA refers to the distorted random words or numbers that you are asked to fill out at the end of an email account creation or an online transaction. And of course you have an audio CAPTCHA for those with visual disabilities.

I know we often think of this process as a pain. But you might not think so once you learn why this technology exists in the first place. CAPTCHA was developed by Carnegie Mellon University, and was deployed in 2001. It is used for ensuring that an online form is filled by a human rather than by a bot.

Now, what's a bot? A bot is a software that is capable of doing any simple and structurally repetitive task at a rate much faster than a human, including automatic filling of an online form. Now CAPTCHAs circumvent this since bots aren't capable of deciphering the distorted text or number that pops up on your screen.

Even though it sounds simple, it’s an important technology for making our Internet activity safer. It's because of CAPCHA's that our e-mail services are less vulnerable to spamming or our blogs and forums are less vulnerable to automated posting.

So next time when you see those distorted weird words or numbers, decipher them with a smile on your face.