Friday, October 24, 2008

Dear CAPTCHA

Or more importantly,

Dear websites such as Youtube and Myspace who use CAPTCHA,

I hate you. Yes, I will be that blunt in a hypothetical letter because, my darling, you make me angry. Not only do you frustrate me beyond recognition, you waste my time. Half of my life (...internet life) is spent attempting to decipher your incredulous letters, your unrecognizable word-mazes in their plain bold writing that is mangled beyond the feeble computer intellect. Time and time again you appear to me, and each of those times I have a desperate, exhausting need to reach through the pixels displayed on screen and tenderly crush you.
As I catch that first glimpse of your random numerals and letters and attempt to take you on for the first time, I can feel the haste in my fingers, wanting to dispose of you like a garbage truck would dispose of rubbish. I want to put away with you, like a mother getting so tired of informing her child to clean their room that she gives in and does it herself. Alas, like there is always that forgotten rubbish bin pushed over and unable to be collected and like there is the obvious fact that no matter how many times you will clean my room mother dearest, it will always get messy again, the CAPTCHA will always return. Sometimes it will return immediately, to laugh at the errors that are made and add irony to the already dire situation. On occasion it will happen a third time, and *shudder* possibly a fourth. It has a mocking nature, captcha.

It makes one wonder, does this stupid contraption honestly believe that I am a spammer? That I am a robot program or a hacker, or just an insensitive prick who spams people's channels/pages? When have I EVER shown that? What on earth have I done to you to deserve this horrific punishment?

Or, more importantly, WHY?????????????

As my frustration leaves me through this letter, so must I now leave you.

I hope you die,

Love, Olivia.


ahem. This is the product of me having to write the CAPTCHA four times while trying to log into myspace. Its had it coming. Now if you will excuse me, I have to mails this.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Liv, I'm exceedingly impressed at the eloquence with which you express your frustration at Captcha. This ability is no doubt due at least in part to your apparent voracious reading. I don't know if your taste extends to autobiographies, but I can recommend Hospital by the River by Catherine Hamlin - which is about the foundation of the Fistula hospital in Addis Ababa Ethiopia and Brooke Hanson's autobiography When Silver is Gold..

Anonymous said...

Don't blame CAPTCHA, blame spam. Before the ridiculous levels of spam that infiltrate all levels of the internet these days people were concerned with forms. Now that forms are everywhere, from MySpace to corporate contact emails, we need to attempt to counter spammers.

CAPTCHA, or similar services, are in place to prevent the exploitation of websites by bots. Even this commenting system has a CAPTCHA-style service. Without them, MySpace would be the least of your worries. Enough bots at the one location and you and millions of other bloggers wouldn't be able to spew your thoughts randomly on your own little corner of the 'net.

Simply put, CAPTCHA-style services attempt to prevent bot attacks. Bot attacks can cost companies a lot of $$$. If it costs them too many $$$ then there would be no YouTube, no MySpace, no Blogger etc. So what if you have to slow down and actually think about what your doing for just a few seconds...might make a nice change...