Registration Security: Why Does Face Book Ask Us To Copy Two Words With A Line Drawn Through Them ?
January 22, 2010 by admin
Filed under FAQ on advance for astigmatism
Why are the two words typed as though they were on a wave and at different hights? It makes me think of an eye exam for astigmatism. Can anyone expain this to me?
It is so that a computer can’t just read the words and put them in. It is to make sure that it is a person typing in your passwords and such. This eliminates brute force hacking where someone just bombards the server trying to guess people’s login and passwords. So far there are no programs that can decipher all those different wavy words. Hope this makes sense for you.
Those are called “captchas” and in this case they’re intended to prevent the automated creation of massive numbers of accounts for malicious purposes (spam, scams, …)
The idea is that a computer won’t be able to read the graphic and figure out what the characters are. I suspect some captchas are better at that than are others.
Hope that helps.