Captcha if You Can

I follow a lot of forums, blogs, and other sites to further my SQL knowledge. We’ve all run into CAPTCHA over the years. The idea of course is that they are easily solved by humans, yet difficult or impossible for computers to solve.

However, it seems like it’s becoming more and more difficult to read them lately. I suspect that the sites have to develop more and more difficult CAPTCHA algorithms to counteract hacker programs which attempt to read them.

For example, the other day I happened by this article at Coding Horror, which is one of my favorite blogs. Jeff Atwood is amazing and if you haven’t read his stuff, do what I did, start at the beginning and read almost everything. Anyway, in that article he complains about the byzantine ways that software is priced and how he purchased too much memory for his SQL Server because SQL Server Standard is capped at 32gb.

I was going to reply with quip about how he should have hired (or at least asked) Brent Ozar, another genius blogger who I read religiously. However, when I attempted to do so, I was faced with the following:

Umm… outtakes krthella???

I dare you to tell me what that last “word” is. I can almost hear you saying, “Well, refresh and get another one.” However, these things are supposed to be easy and I had to refresh three times before I got one I could read. Instead of leaving my comment, I decided to blog about it instead.

Then I went to Craigslist because I run into CAPTCHAs there too and tried to list one of my old video games for sale. I ran into this:

Did you gues Corcillo bequeath? I did, but was incorrect.

I realize these sites need protection against spammers, but aren’t we reaching the usable limits of CAPTCHA if users can’t easily read them?