Unfortunately, as technology and hackers become more advanced, so do their scamming tactics. It does not prevent against cyberbullying, but does prevent bots from posting messages automatically.

Lastly, web pages or blogs that contain message boards or contact forms use CAPTCHA to prevent spammy messages or comments. This allows legitimate customers to purchase tickets fairly and keeps scalpers from placing thousands of ticket orders. Ticket websites such as TicketMaster also use CAPTCHA to prevent ticket scalpers from over purchasing tickets for large events. CAPTCHAs prevent spammers from using bots to create a plethora of spam email accounts. CAPTCHA came into play so that users could not take advantage of the polling system.Īnother use of CAPTCHA is for registration forms on websites such as Yahoo! Mail or Gmail where people can create free accounts. These schools received thousands of votes, while other schools only hit a few hundred. Students from the universities Carnegie Mellon and MIT created bots, or automated programs to repeatedly vote for their schools. In 1999, Slashdot created a poll that asked visitors to choose the graduate school that had the best program for computer science. First and foremost, CAPTCHA is used for verifying online polls. Who Uses CAPTCHA?ĬAPTCHA is used on a variety of websites that want to verify that the user is not a robot. Computers find it difficult to understand languages because of the strange and intricate rules human languages take on, along with slang that humans use. The internet and computers are actually made up of a unique coding language. It is also common to choose from a variety of images where you need to select a common theme. The most common form of CAPTCHA is an image with several distorted letters. CAPTCHAs stretch or manipulate letters and numbers, and rely on human ability to determine which symbols they are.ĬAPTCHAs were invented to block spammy software from posting comments on pages or purchasing excess items at once. In other words, CAPTCHA determines whether the user is real or a spam robot. While most of the time this is a quick step before you can continue your activity, many people wonder what a CAPTCHA is? And what is its purpose? What does CAPTCHA mean?ĬAPTCHA stands for Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart. When entering credentials or credit card information on websites, you might be asked to copy a series of words or a math sum to continue.

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