Otherwise, it might keep out innocent bystanders as well as bots. "What's 3 + 3?" won't stop many determined spammer bots.Īnother proposal: Ask a pitifully easy question like, "What color is the sky?" This kind of blockade is great if you're an English speaker and a perfect speller. The trick here, of course, is finding puzzles that are simple enough for everyone to solve, regardless of education level-and still hard enough to stop automated software bots. Instead of trying to interpret a garbled-looking word, you're asked to solve a simple math problem like "What's 3 + 3?" Both blind people and seeing people could solve this one. But the same problems apply: sometimes it's hard for even a human to understand the word, and of course deaf people are left out. You hear a garbled, scratchy recording of someone saying a word, and you're supposed to type in what it says. Some sites now offer image puzzles: "Draw a circle around the photo of a lighthouse." Great-unless you're blind.
Unfortunately, non-English speakers won't know how to respond, either. In a task puzzle, you're asked to do something, like "Tap here if you're human." In theory, a software bot can't do that. In a world of tablets and touch-screen phones, a typing puzzle is extra clumsy. Various people have come up with alternatives to the hated Captcha. And although they're no longer sufficient to stop spammers' increasingly sophisticated bots, they're 100 percent effective in keeping out blind people. (Read more about Captchas in March's Scientific American.) They’re designed to thwart spammers whose automated software bots would otherwise pollute the Web site with phony sign-ups.īut Captchas are sometimes so difficult that even humans can't solve them. Captchas are those annoying "What does this garbled text say?" puzzles that you have to solve before you're allowed to sign up for something online.
0 kommentar(er)
