It is totally my fault that CAPTCHA has returned to my computer.
I tumble down the rabbit hole every time the little box comes up for me declare that I am not a robot. I check that I am not, and obviously the programming has second thoughts about that. Understandable, actually.
By Nikolay Shaplov – Transferred from en.wikibooks to Commons by Adrignola using CommonsHelper., GPL, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=12813815
The idea of CAPTCHA is that humans can handle these puzzles while current bots – computer programming – cannot.
I was almost nostalgic the first time I ran into a new CAPTCHA. I rarely saw one. The nostalgia faded quickly, like remembering the smell of mentholatum.
The new onslaught of paranoid puzzles threw nine photographs in front of me. Click on the ones with cars in the picture.
One of the photos was so grainy and dark that it could have been a runaway giraffe for all I could tell. Another had a shadow under a tree that might have been concealing a car or cheerleading squad.
And then there was the shot down a highway with lumps of something in the distance. Were those cars or elk? Who could tell? Was I supposed to know?
Who would think that proving I’m human would be so challenging? (Siblings are not allowed to join the discussion at this point.)
I clicked three photos with cars and leaned closer to my monitor, hoping the other photos would somehow enhance.
If you’ve seen CSI shows, you know what I mean. They take a street video that consists of grainy pixels and enhance it about 100 times until the license plate magically -and clearly -appears. Or they can do facial recognition on that shadowy form in the front seat that could have been a bag of groceries as far as I could tell.
Trust me on this: that enhance technique would produce a photo as sharp as a blob of gray clay.
Then there are those letters that you have to read and type in the box below.
CAPTCHA letters may have been created by optometrists waiting just outside the door for your next eye exam. You’ll think you need it after trying to untangle blurry, elongated, and overlapping letters politely called distorted text.
Although I have to admit that there are guys in my life who don’t write any better.
CAPTCHA now happens every time I log into a website, throwing goofy letters or blurry photos in my face. These are puzzles that I’m supposed to solve.
I guess bots can’t do those things. Neither can half the adults, I suspect.
The reason for CAPTCHA reappearing in my life is my fault. When I got concerned about tech giants tracking my web browsing, I shut off the permissions. Suddenly my digital fingerprint disappeared.
For years, websites knew it was me – not a bot -by the fingerprints I was leaving. When I shut off that permission, CAPTCHA got suspicious.
I’m stuck with CAPTCHA or leaving fingerprints. The CAPTCHA tests seem fiercer now than what I remember. I can hardly wait for the one that asks me to count all the blades of grass on the out-of-focus lawns.
There could be a plausible reason for this stiff response. Since I’ve gone rogue on the internet harvesting, a new movie could be in store: CAPTCHA’s Revenge.
