Monday, August 20, 2007

Blow me, Visual Verification!

OK, with the state of the Internet, I know there has to be some checkpoint measure taken to make sure that a human is filling out a comment on a blog, rather than a sophisticated program, but fuck!

I was trying to ad my pithy wisdom to one of my favorite blogs, and after pouring out my soul in the comment section, thus adding to the Human Experience, I was confronted with the "Visual Verification"(addressed hereafter as VV, as I hate it so much), which was so completely impossible to read that I got it wrong three times before I finally pulled it off. (This may be my favorite run-on sentence ever, so I'm leaving it! I talk like a run-on sentence.) I don't have time for that! I gots things to do.

They make it much harder to read, I'm going to need a freaking program just to read it for me! I love the justification for VV, that it makes it impossible for a machine to read. Oh really, wise Internet security experts? Ever heard of OCR software? My crappy digital pen can translate my left-handed scribbles,(far worse, most likely than the VV can produce) into plain text with a 95% accuracy. I'm thinking that a diabolical spammer can come up with a remedy to your infallible VV measure pretty darn quick, if he felt it was worth his time.

If spammers are ever going to be stopped, it will be as a formal declaration of war against them, and destroy their means of spewing their porn, virus and get-rich-quick schemes at the root, namely their ISP access. A case can be made that they are elusive and unstoppable, but money is always traceable to and from a source if your work as a collective to uncover it.

Of course, when that day inevitably comes, and the World Police finish them once and for all, our world will become that more homogenized and uninteresting. Be careful what you wish for.
Oh, and make sure you copy my visual verifier before attempting to post. :)

P.S. Or is it just me?

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I got rid of mine, too. Not that it bothers me that much, but a few commenters mentioned it.

What I hate is that damn no-reply comment thing you get on emails. I want to reply and I don't want to go on a scavenger hunt for an email address!

Sarcasm Abounds said...

I feel exactly like that! I still forget regularly, and get a bounced email.

SA