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Is CAPTCHA Useful? 
By: Oleg
"CAPTCHA", which is trademarked the Carnegie Mellon University, is a short form for "Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart". It is a test, which helps the computer to differentiate between machines and human beings. It has the capability of creating and grading tests that automatically accepts all humans and rejects all machines.
The idea is that while as humans we can make out a series of distorted letters and numbers, a machine will not be able to make sense of such images. To learn more about how the program works you can visit http://www.protectwebform.com/. There is also a site for our more advanced version of the program at http://www.protectwebform.com/smartcaptcha.
Most website owners find CAPTCHA very useful. Such tests help to prevent programs known as bots. Bots are programs that pretend to be humans and abuse the services of the internet. Bots try to sell or make you sign up for thousands of free mail services. The bots spam your inbox daily. They intrude into common chat rooms to accumulate personal information and publishing links to various sites for promotional benefits.
The bots create worms that can cause immense harm to your machine. They crack your passwords, assault privacy and use your personal information for commercial use without your permission.
CAPTCHA is a sure shot way of preventing these bots from creating havoc. The CAPTCHA asks the user to recognize the distorted image of letters and numbers usually with a string over a ‘noisy’ background. While it is easy for a human to decipher it, the machine usually cannot. And, that is how CAPTCHA distinguishes between a human user and a computer. Various large and small sites find CAPTCHA quite useful. No wonder, you see them in mail services, banking sites, blogs, chat rooms and similar places.
Spammers send unsolicited messages in bulk to you inbox. These messages are not desirable at all. The most common kind of spam is email spam. However there can be other spam too in the form of usenet newsgroup spam, log spam, search engine spam, instamessaging spam and similar others.
Advertisers resort to spamming as spamming does not incur any kind of operating costs other than the cost of managing the list of individuals that are targeted to receive the mails. Also you cannot hold the sender accountable for the mass mailers they send. Since there is no entry barriers, spamming has become really ubiquitous. This is the reason why all your inbox is so inundated with mass mailers whenever you access them.
On newsgroups, the spam is Usenet Spam. You may have seen this when you log into a newsgroup you enjoy. You may be trying to read a topic but see that is has been inundated with post after post of some sort of advertisement that doesn't belong there. That's Usenet spam.
The other kind of spam, which is the email spam usually targets individuals with direct messages. The list of ids that are targeted to spam can be created by scanning postings from Usenet or pilfering with the Internet mailing list. This kind of spamming does incur a little more money.
Article Source: http://www.uberarticles.com/articles
The author, Oleg, is an expert on CAPTCHA design. Click to find out more about his revolutionary new Smart CAPTCHA technology.
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