Should I Use 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.

It works on the assumption that humans can read distorted machines but machines usually cannot do so. You can know more about CAPTCHA and smart CAPTCHA at http://www.protectwebform.com/ and 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.

In addition these bots can put a worm on your system, getting your passwords, and other personal information and taking it back to the Internet for others to use commercially without you even knowing how they got it.

CAPTCHA is a sure shot way of preventing these bots from creating havoc. The CAPTCHA asks the user to recognize the distorted image of letters and numbers usually with a string over a ‘noisy’ background. While it is easy for a human to decipher it, the machine usually cannot. And, that is how CAPTCHA distinguishes between a human user and a computer. Various large and small sites find CAPTCHA quite useful. No wonder, you see them in mail services, banking sites, blogs, chat rooms and similar places.

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.

On newsgroups, the spam is Usenet Spam. You may have seen this when you log into a newsgroup you enjoy. You may be trying to read a topic but see that is has been inundated with post after post of some sort of advertisement that doesn't belong there. That's Usenet spam.

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.

Article Source: http://www.yourecommerceinfo.com/ecommerce-articles

The author, Oleg, is an expert on CAPTCHA design. Click to find out more about his revolutionary new CAPTCHA Plugin technology.

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