CAPTCHA

Google ceremoniously announced today that they were acquiring a small academic company called reCAPTCHA, which builds software that tries to differentiate humans from algorithms on web submissions.

Sometimes figuring out what those squiggly characters are is tricky and that’s the point. Captchas were designed to require some thinking. Typing in those letters and numbers that appear in the little colorful box is supposed to be a challenge and task that only humans carry out. Online criminals can’t use their bots (and botnets) to distinguish letters and numbers that have been altered beyond their automated recognition capabilities.

It seems like it was the just the other day that I was writing about how CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Public Turing Test to Tell Computers and Humans Apart)" was quickly becoming completely useless for Web security. Actually, it was just the other day-two days ago-but I was wrong. CAPTCHA is already completely useless.

You may not know the term, "CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Public Turing Test to Tell Computers and Humans Apart)," but you've used it. You may not, however, be using it for much longer.

In today's podcast: EC to investigate US crackdown on Internet gambling; CAPTCHA can't prevent rise in Gmail spam; and Cisco to release regular security patches.