How Useful Is CAPTCHA

What is CAPTCHA It stands for Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart. It is a test that assists a computer in telling the difference between humans and machines, that has been trademarked by Carnegie Mellon University. With CAPTCHA a computer can detect whether a machine or a person completed a test, and discard any computer answers.

The idea is that while as humans we can make out a series of distorted letters and numbers, a machine will not be able to make sense of such images. To learn more about how the program works you can visit http://www.protectwebform.com/. There is also a site for our more advanced version of the program at http://www.protectwebform.com/smartcaptcha.

Having a CAPTCHA installed can protect against bots, which are programs that can repeatedly spam inboxes, try to post and retrieve personal information in chatrooms, and also try to get e-mail addresses and other information to use for promotions to sell services or items, or sign you up for numerous free mail services.

The bots crack your passwords, encroach upon your privacy and use your personal information for commercial use without your permission. They create worms that can cause immense harm to your machine.

You can use a CAPTCHAS or a CAPTCHA plug-in (http://www.protectwebform.com/plugin_wordpress) to stop these bots from taking over your system. Many sites of all sizes have installed these. Once the CAPTCHA is running as bots try to get into your system, they will be asked to type out a distorted image shown on the screen. Since computers can rarely translate these messy images into letters as humans can, it can stop the bot. you may have seen a CAPTCHA when logging onto your mail service, into a chatroom, or onto your bank website.

Spam seems to unfortunately be way of life. Day in and day out spammers are sending message after message into your e-mail system. But it's not just in e-mail that you may be hit with spam. Spam also is a problem in online newsgroups, logs, search engines and even instant messaging!

Advertisers resort to spamming as spamming does not incur any kind of operating costs other than the cost of managing the list of individuals that are targeted to receive the mails. Also you cannot hold the sender accountable for the mass mailers they send. Since there is no entry barriers, spamming has become really ubiquitous. This is the reason why all your inbox is so inundated with mass mailers whenever you access them.

Usenet spam is a message that can be sent to twenty or more Usenet newsgroups. This kind of spam is usually targeted to those people who visit and read the newsgroups but do not post anything or give any kind of address. This kind of spam inundates the newsgroups with unnecessary advertisement and posts. It also challenges the owners ability to accept and manage the topics on the system.

The other kind of spam, which is the email spam usually targets individuals with direct messages. The list of ids that are targeted to spam can be created by scanning postings from Usenet or pilfering with the Internet mailing list. This kind of spamming does incur a little more money.