Completely Arbitrary Protocol To Cause Horrific Aggravation
One of the things I'd most like to see banished from the internet is the CAPTCHA, a chirpy acronym that stands for Completely Arbitrary Protocol To Cause Horrific Aggravation. I'm pretty sure it's that, anyway.
I know for a fact that this is not the best way to secure information on the internet. How do I know this? Common sense. No bank website I've ever used uses CAPTCHA for security. Nor do big businesses like Amazon, PayPal or Ebay. These are the websites that deal with the information that it is most vitally important that hackers don't get at; your bank account details. They don't use CAPTCHA, and they seem pretty secure to me.
What does use CAPTCHA? Hotmail. Hotmail uses it. And this has got to be the only piece of evidence required to demonstrate that CAPTCHA is an utterly useless method of security. Hotmail has got to be the most hacked site in existance, effectively demonstrated by the time some internet badman managed to spoof my account information and enlist me as a proxy viagra salesman.
What was Hotmail's solution to this horrific web-crime? Make me enter a CAPTCHA. And guess what? My account continued to be spoofed on a daily basis. Well done Hotmail, well done CAPTCHA.
Know how I stopped my account getting spoofed? I changed my password. Hey, The Internet, remember passwords? Those little memorable combinations of letters and numbers that people use to stop everyone on Earth being able to get into their information?
Those are perfectly good for securing my damn bank details, so why don't we all use those, and quit making me copy out a list of goddamn squiggly-ass letters I can't bloody read? Thank you.
Oh, and if this wasn't a compelling enough argument that CAPTCHAs are bloody useless, here's more evidence.
