Concept in Definition ABC

Many times when we try to complete a record on a web page, and after our data (name, surname, address of email, ...), an image appears, a Photography or a He drew, in which we can read some characters, letters and numbers, characters that we must re-enter through the keyboard in a box text.

What is that element? What is it for?

This element, which is called Captcha, is nothing more than a test that a computer could not pass, and that allows us to verify that the person doing the recording is a human being and not a machine.

And this is interesting because, in this way, the automation of the use of free services is prevented, limiting, for example, the use of free mail servers in fraudulent practices such as those of spam.

The fact of being as they are follows a logic crushing: the artificial intelligence is, today, very limited, and programs are often not capable of recognizing ways that a human being can distinguish quickly in photographs, so that a text camouflaged in an image, is a calculation and power problem for a computer.

The software with which we carry out the attack to jump the protection provided by a Captcha and the machine in which it is executed, they must be powerful, since only to distinguish the letters and numbers it will already carry a significant load of job.

There is no agreement on the paternity of the Captcha, although it is certain that they saw the light between the end of the nineties and the beginning of the new century.

Its use began to become popular since then, and now it is impossible to find a record of a service online (either free or paid) in which it is not mandatory to solve a Captcha in some moment.

In recent times, an even safer substitute or complement to Captcha has been sought that fulfills the same function

Among these new methods is reCaptcha, which increases the level of difficulty of the recognition of the content of the images by adding a word, so that it is not only one, but two words to to recognize.

This, computers, requires a higher power level, which they will reach in the long future term, but which for now cannot be afforded, thereby delaying the possibility of hack it.

Another way is through speech recognition, an even more arduous task for the computer.

In this case, most Captchas already allow you to listen to a speech of the characters enclosed in the image to make them accessible to the visually impaired, so technology already exists.

Photos: Fotolia - georgejmclittle / mzayyad