Captcha or tortcha?

So the good news for anyone that prefers the rants and meanderings of the usual postcards will be glad to hear that a new blog has begun to take over the creative venture posts.  So no more on here about those unless of course it falls under the heading of rant.  If you were actually reading the posts about those exploits, you can check in on swornnotbythemoon.blogspot.com or the blog page on the website, or the blog tab of the facebook page - I've got it linking in by RSS to synch instantly.  And that's that.

But in setting up all the tie-ins, something set me off on a bit of a rant.  The Captcha.  Not only is it a horrible non-word, but it's an annoying little validation device springing up in more and more locations.  Sometimes, although they're displayed in lower case, to pass the test you have to switch on caps lock.  Sometimes they're displayed in upper case and only work if you type in lower.  Sometimes it wants mixed case.  You can only find out which it wants through trial and error.  That's if you have the patience not to give up and go somewhere else.

This morning, the captcha encounter so infuriated me that I had to remind myself it was not the fault of my machine and it would be very silly to punch it in either the keyboard or the screen.  I was simply trying to post a link, but for that I had to prove I'm human and really medical science can only probably on that one.  I gave up in the end and came back later.  In the later attempt though, the pop-up window showed me two words, not just the one it had showed before.  When I say words (which by my definition Captcha itself is not) the first was a jumble of six random letters and the second an actual word.  This time it worked on the forst attempt.

Most irksome.  What if I'd been trying to enter time sensitive information?  What if the delay had cost me millions of pounds?  I can almost guarantee there's something in the terms and conditions of use that puts them in the clear.  Not that they could afford to reimburse me for the millions I've hypothetically lost, especially if their share price stays so close to the IPO.  You know who I'm talking about now, right?

I can imagine captchas not working on there all the time though.  Nothing on there works all the time, probably because things aren't allowed to stay the same for five minutes.  It's not a problem exclusive to one site though.  It happens all over the place.  It makes me think that somebody, somewhere must have hit upon the idea and made it work.  Then someone else's CEO saw it and thought I want that on my company's website too but wanted this change and that change and can it be more like this until damn thing sort of worked and sort of didn't.  The someone else's CEO said just copy that and the failure propagated like an overly fertile bunny rabbit.  I'm blaming the CEO but it could as easily have been the tea lady.

Captchas are one of the best and yet worst inventions in the virtual world.  I think we might need to get the UN involved to regulate just how much tortcha they inflict.