Ben Reichelt’s Weblog

Since we’ve been moving into the new house over the past few weeks, I
haven’t been able to blog as much as I’ve wanted to, because we’ve been
busy, but also because we don’t have any internet access at home just
yet.  So I’m relegated to blogging at work, which I’d rather not
do too often.  In any case, what I wanted to talk about today was
CAPTCHA tests.  I read this article on slashdot
a little bit ago and it got me thinking about a better test.  I
know there are a lot of people who really don’t like CAPTCHA tests as a
way to filter comment spam, but I don’t really get the hassle. 
Nobody minds using a password for their ATM card, or a password for
their email, I dont see why entering a few letters is such a huge deal.
The only part that I dont like is when you run into a CAPTCHA test
thats pretty damn hard and you get it wrong.

On the site mentioned above, he outlines what are good CAPTCHA tests
and what aren’t.  Based on the examples he shows, I would think
that you could make a pretty damn good captcha test, meaning its easy
for humans to read but really hard for programs to read, by using
flash.  You could make some crazy animations that would be easily
human readable, and I dont think that a program could read the output
of it. I dont know how prevalent it is for spammers to break captcha
tests, but if it becomes bad, I would think using a flash captcha would
definitely make their lives more difficult.