Here Kitty Kitty Kitty!

OK. I don't know about you, but my blog comments gets more traffic from spammers than it does from real comments.

It also seems that I have been hearing an awful lot about Captcha's. In truth, i learned about these two weeks ago when I attended a conference for women bloggers called BlogHer. Interesting conference to say the least. Pretty Google and FireFox centric, but that is a topic for another post.

So one of the discussions that I heard during one of the sessions was about Captcha's, and how one should really consider incorporating that into their sites. I did a bit more reading and chatting about these (yes, another Arm Chair Discussion with my man after he listened to a podcast on this very subject) , and it is a very interesting technique for determining if you are a human being.

<from the movie The Fifth Element during random police raid>

Police: Are you classified as human?
Korben Dallas : Negative, I am a meat popsicle.

</end>

I find it very funny that we, as humans, develop programs to automate things, and then develop programs to determine if something is automated and block it. Just a random thought, kinda funny, I digress...

So Captcha (an acronym for Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart), is exactly what the acronym describes, and is trademarked by Carnegie Mellon University. It is to help with many things, from helping to prevent email spam, and blog comment spam. You can read more about what this is all about on wikipedia on Captcha's. These are those wierd distorted letters you see thatyou have to verify by typing in so that you can get access to something (like sigining up for a new service such as an email account).

Well we humans, being smart, clever, devious things, are getting better at programming around the standard psychedelic letters. So the other side of the is trying to outsmart the computers (or is it ourselves, wierd) by finding other ways to determine if you are human. This was an interesting article that was posted up on InfoWorld last week about using pictures and having people identify what is in the picture. It goes on to note, that instead of identifying a person (like who is the hottie in this group of photos), they are switching to using animals, like kitties.

Pretty cool stuff I must say. Go check it out here.