CAPTCHA's are an irritating but necessary evil. The system that is used to verify whether or not a user is human has been around a while and it had to evolve because machines were getting better at reading the text than humans. With its latest iteration, Google says you'll no longer have to input anything at all.
Last December, Telstra promised to get rid of all CAPTCHA verification from its site by 30 September, 2014. Today, it announced it had reached that goal. This is a worthy achievement which every other CAPTCHA-deploying site must emulate.
CAPTCHA is evil and must be stopped. This much we know. Here's another nail in the coffin of the universally-loathed authentication system: it turns out that despite being designed to stop automated processes, CAPTCHAs can actually be easily cracked with the right kind of computing power.
We've said it many times: CAPTCHA is evil and sucks and must be eliminated. So we're pleased to learn that Telstra is planning to dump the unfriendly authentication method from its sites entirely.
When we mentioned yesterday that one of the problems with web site CAPTCHA forms is that they aren't accessible via screen readers for the blind or visually impaired, several readers suggested the 'audio CAPTCHA' buttons seen on many sites were an acceptable alternative. Unfortunately that's not the case, as ACCAN disability policy advisor Wayne Hawkins explained to us.
I have complained about CAPTCHA as a security measure many times around these parts, but that doesn't stop some of the biggest players in the market continuing to use annoying and often unreadable CAPTCHA security (yes, I'm looking at you, Google, your CAPTCHA sucks to a level arguably only matched by Optus). A new Australian campaign against CAPTCHA highlights a crucial point: they suck badly and waste time for most people, but they register large swathes of the internet actually unusable for the vision-impaired.
Imfy.us is a URL-shortening service for people who want to ensure the users clicking through their shortened URLs are actually people and not web-indexing search engine crawlers.
When we noted shortcomings with Google's own CAPTCHA security protection recently, several readers suggested the Big G should shift to using reCAPTCHA. Now Google has gone one step better and actually acquired the protect-your-system-against-machine-registrations provider.
You know the feeling: you're trying to sign into Google on a non-regular machine, Google decides it needs to throw a CAPTCHA at you for security, and the image is completely unreadable. Is that annoyance ever going to disappear?
