You’ll recall that, about a year ago, we decided to make captchas—those things you find on Web sites at login that require you to decipher and type words or numbers—our raison d’etre. Two days later we stopped caring (though it is incredibly annoying to have to deal with a captcha, as you see up there, when trying to log into my router—is a spammer or other evildoer going to bother with my dumb router?). So imagine my delight this morning when I read that Google is hard at work developing a new type a captcha, one that, hopefully, won’t drive us crazy anymore.
Rather than having you decipher words and numbers, Google’s new captcha has you interacting with pictures. Let’s say you’re trying to log into animalsthatremindyouofcelebrities.com For the captcha, the Web site would serve you a row of upside-down pictures, maybe of a tree, a car and a bird. Your job, as a human being trying to log into the site for a quick laugh, would be to select and flip the picture of the bird; it is an animal site, after all. (This is obviously easier accomplished with a touchscreen phone like the iPhone or Palm Pre.) Once the bird has been flipped, you’re in.
It sounds a heck of a lot easier than some of the other captchas I run into on a daily basis. More than once have I tried to log into a message board or whatever, failed to correctly interpret the captcha, then said, “oh, forget it, I’ll just go somewhere else.”
(Unrelated: if Newcastle goes down, how long till they get back into the Premier League? My guess is never: the club is a shambles, and they’ll be kicking around the Championship for a little while. That’s if they do, indeed, go down today. It’s 12:30pm as I write this and nothing has been decided yet.)
In short, I abhor captchas; may Google reinvent the whole concept.
Enjoy your weekend!