OT: PITA website security

I understand your frustration. Option b is particularly annoying in that you have to do it several times.

^ I didn't know British people got frustrated

Some sites just ask you to check a box labeled "I am not a robot."

Yes, irritating, but unfortunately necessary because of the bots rampant on the web. That type of feature is called a CAPTCHA, or Completely Automated Public Turing Test to tell Computers and Humans Apart, named after early computer pioneer Alan Turing. During WW II Turing designed a top secret computer that broke the Nazi enigma code. Unfortunately, soon after, he was prosecuted for being a homosexual, which was illegal in the UK at the time, and he eventually committed suicide. “The Imitation Game” is an excellent movie about him, starring Benedict Cumberbatch. I think his conviction was overturned or he was posthumously pardoned or something like that recently. I'm sure that's a great comfort to him.

Yes, annoying af. It serves a purpose I guess but it like taking a quiz in 8:00 am art class with a hangover and the hot chick that makes the class worthwhile hasn’t shown up yet.

It is irritating, but I blame the people who make it necessary.

Also, the British are constantly frustrated; they're just very polite about it.

I abhor CAPTCHA, especially if it comes up when browsing on my phone. The "click all the boxes" variation is better than the older "distorted letters" variation, but they're invariably frustrating.

I suppose it's still preferable to hooking us all up to Voigt-Kampf machines....

Oh, no the British enjoy the captcha pics. They also like standing in line, which they call "queuing".

Last night I was simply sending an email to a company I bought something from and just to send a short email I had to do the distorted-letters thing and of course I had to do it more than once - I guess I could understand if it was an important financial transaction or something but not for a simple email

The need for these stems from a company's very real fear of being slammed with bot traffic during a DDOS attack. The idea is to jam a website (and the computers behind it) with so much traffic that it can't handle the volume and it crashes or slows to a crawl.

The fundamental problem is that current methods to authenticate that you are "you" when interacting with a web or mobile site are decades old. A malicious machine can be programmed with a script that creates fake user names or emails and passwords and the script can be put on auto run. The CAPTCHA and pick a pic methods are much harder for an automated script to use successfully.

As the world of tech advances, new methods for authenticating users (i.e.: ensuring that you are you and not someone pretending to be you) are emerging. These will be behind the scenes and seamless to the user. There are several new ideas out there, but none of them has scaled to widespread use - yet.

Think of the movie Minority Report, where every location has multiple scanners that can read eye prints. And then remember that even with that type of (creepy) technology, criminals were still able to defeat it.

Just trying to ensure a human is involved, but like anything dealing with computers, that can be broken.

Fun,

Computers can only deal with two things, 1s and 0s, but they can do that REAL FAST!

When you are drunk it can be hard. Maybe some of us need this on our phones before we text. lol