A digital program or system designed to distinguish human from machine input, typically as a way of thwarting spam and automated extraction of data from websites.
The word is an acronym for ‘Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart.’
The Brief History of CAPTCHA
The term ‘CAPTCHA’ was coined by Luis von Ahn, Manuel Blum, Nicholas J. Hopper, and John Langford in 2003. The most common type of CAPTCHA with distorted words was first invented in 1997 by two groups working in parallel. The first group consisted of Mark D. Lillibridge, Martin Abadi, Krishna Bharat, and Andrei Z. Broder; the second group consisted of Eran Reshef, Gili Raanan and Eilon Solan.
The early form of CAPTCHA requires that the computer user type the letters of a distorted image, sometimes with the addition of an obscured sequence of letters or digits that appears on the screen.
The other purpose of introducing CAPTCHA was to help in the digitization of books. The words typed into the CAPTCHA box are the digital replacement for the same words from hard copies. This helped in building the digital inventory of books.
It takes the average person approximately 10 seconds to solve a typical CAPTCHA.
Why use CAPTCHA?
SPAM is real. Spam is the digital equivalent of Junk mail. The spam-related issues have caused billions of dollars in loss for the global corporations. It isn’t surprising that if you own an email address, you will know how many junk emails drop into your inbox every day.
Although a nuisance sometimes CAPTCHA does help to curb spam. It limits the software generated a program from sending you incessant marketing emails, pornography fliers, and donation causes.
What is reCAPTCHA?
reCAPTCHA is a free service introduced by Google that protects your website from spam and abuse. reCAPTCHA uses an advanced risk analysis engine and adaptive challenges to keep automated software from engaging in abusive activities on your site. It does this while letting your valid users pass through with ease.
reCAPTCHA was originally developed by Luis von Ahn, David Abraham, Manuel Blum, Michael Crawford, Ben Maurer, Colin McMillen, and Edison Tan at Carnegie Mellon University's main Pittsburgh campus. It was acquired by Google in September 2009.
"I AM NOT A ROBOT"
The system basically detects your mouse movement to determine if you’re a bot or a human to help prevent spam.
