Okay, at the risk of being massively flamed, the big point is that captchas are hard to break because it is not easily automated, hence stopping things like spam. It is usually prohibitively inconvenient and expensive to hire actual humans to read and therefore break captchas. however, it's not the only way to stop spam..it's just the simplest one to implement. It takes As mentioned by others, there are many other ways to replace captchas. Personally, I think some of these alternate methods are fantastic and make more sense than captchas, but there is no one easy method to add some of these alternate methods because they are highly audience/culture/language dependent, while the Roman alphabet, numbers and non-alphanumeric characters used in most captchas are easy to randomly generate and use everywhere, from domain names to..well..everything.
The good news is that there is this system called recaptcha that is growing in use. The point of it is to digitize un-OCR-able words by using the very idea of a captcha..that (sighted) people can read words OCR software cannot. The good part is that there's an audio captcha there to select instead of the images! cheers, jane On Wed, Mar 26, 2008 at 2:30 PM, UCLA Bruins Fan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Can anyone tell me what the function of CAPTCHAS is supposed to be? > Why are they needed on so many sites? Do they really perform any > function other than making it difficult for blind users to access sites? > Olivia > > >
