My reply to Worst Captchas of All Time if your icon were a captcha, my answer would be "young boy sucking his thumb". Yes it's a bit like a Rorschach inkblot test as used for psychiatric evaluations. In fact I tagged the image 'boy sipping tea' and another LJ user thought it was the 'silhouette of a boy with great hair' :) It's from picbreeder.or - a genetic art website. The images are generated...

...at richardxthripp.com. The verification images are provided by the reCAPTCHA project , and are words from books that optical character recognition has failed on. Much more interesting than ugly CAPTCHAs with words that make no sense. I implemented it with the WP-reCAPTCHA plugin . There’s no need for CAPTCHAs when commenting because every blog has Akismet for comment spam protection, which...

... but some implementation of Captcha can be readily defeated. Coding Horror showed a chart from a Chinese site of several catpchas types and their difficulty to defeat. The chart shows that some captchas are very diificult to with OCR techniques. Good discussion on defeating captchas at Schneier on Security . Some of the comments have good links for more information. One of the links is for...

As I'm sure every blind Internet inhabitant knows, accessibility is problematic for us on many web sites, thanks to the proliferation of visual-only CAPTCHAs. These are the distorted characters you have to copy to get into some web sites. The reason is understandable enough. These sites are trying to stop spammers using automated systems to put rubbish on to their sites. I'm sure that's a sentiment...

(You can read about ReCaptcha at http://recaptcha.net/learnmore.html ) In my quest to stop the spam registrations on my phpBB forums on my website ( www.jordancronin.com ) I decided to try ReCAPTCHA's...get any help from there. I'm also trying out Jinzora, but am getting lots of php errors in my apache logs - I don't have time to post about that right now though... As always, comments are welcome

For those of you who don't know, captchas are images that contain obscured letters and numbers for users to type into a text field to "prove they are human" (or just not a spam-bot). They have greatly reduced the amount of spam submitted through forms (and lessened the number of "bot" Livejournals and such that we would undoubtedly have), but I'm relatively surprised that there haven't been more creative...

bruno has a really nice article on how to tackle the problem of image spam, which is the norm nowadays (via rui ). he mentions, though, that one of this days spammers will start using captchas. well, i've been receiving these for 2 or 3 months now (the background of the images is dotted, or striped, or variations thereof). now, i really wanted to comment on this in bruno's site, but it seems...