New Year's Resolution for Tech Companies: Beat it with CAPTCHAs

I'm not talking about the harmless ones with puzzle pieces. I'm not even talking about matching or rotating shapes. I'm talking, specifically, about the crazy image grid — the kind of stuff you might be familiar with from Google's reCAPTCHA system. If you're looking for a measured look at why they exist or efforts to build alternatives, Go read this. I don't feel the measure, although I will note with dismay that CAPTCHA exists to stop bots and does a good job of that.

Do you know how I feel? grouchy.

I was trying to buy tickets for a double feature Blade Runner And RobocopAs you do, after entering my credit card information, the dark ghost appeared. CAPTCHA. I haven't had to resolve a single frustrating traffic image network. I had to solve three.

Look, I have epistemological questions about how to deal with these things. For example: If you ask me to click on pictures that contain a motorcycle, and then show me one picture of a motorcycle spread out across all the squares, the correct number of squares to click is zero. Because each box contains only part From a motorcycle. This is not what he asked of me!

Things get worse. Sometimes I'm asked to select buses, and one of the boxes has a weird, blurry image that might be a bus or a train, but it doesn't have enough context for me to be able to identify it. Is there a “I don't know” option? of course not. And I don't even have a problem with vision, which I suppose would make this whole experience worse Much worse.

I am sure this experience is familiar to every reader the edge. Over the years, you may have read depressing bits like this. Things were bad enough when you had to fill one. But recently, when I was trying to buy something – or even just sign up for an email list To allow someone to market to me – I had to fill out three. three! Why! Why! Why!

We've made it all the way to 2024. Isn't the tech industry supposed to focus on innovation?

So, here's the tech industry's New Year's resolution: kill this thing. Get rid of it. Find another way to determine that I'm not a robot. I never want to click on a fucking motorcycle again.