Exhausted by online tests designed to confirm I’m human
If I have to look at another motorbike any time soon, I will definitely, as we say in the North, lose the bap. Not just motorbikes, mind you. The same goes for traffic lights and trees.
Yes, I’ve been online a great deal in the last week and I’m sick and tired of all those image-based tests.
You know the ones. They ask you to tick the photos in the grid where you can spot, well, generally motorbikes, traffic lights or trees. And all to prove that you’re not a robot but a genuine, living, breathing human being.
They’re called Completely Automated Public Turing tests to tell Computers and Humans Apart. We’ll refer to them by their acronym – Captcha. (Turing relates to British mathematician Alan Turing, who designed a test in 1950 to establish whether machines could ape humans.)
I’m hopeless at it, finding myself peering through my reading glasses at my laptop screen and wondering, for far too long, if that blob of green in the top right-hand corner is a tree. What if it’s a bush or a shrub – does that count?
And while we’re at it, do you have to see the actual lights to fulfil the “traffic lights” definition or does the pole they’re attached to also fit the bill and release you from this Captcha hell?
It usually takes me about three attempts to get rid of the picture boxes before I can proceed. Surely that in itself is enough to prove that I’m human. A robot would have cracked it straight off.
Even if I mess up three times, it lets me proceed anyway, so what’s the point in these Captchas? I throw that word out there as if I’m an expert, but I only looked up the acronym for the first time this week.
We live in an online world that is full of suspicion. Are you really real? Can you read and decipher those words on the screen with all the squiggly letters? Can you spot the trees? Can you look at all the photos on the right and then move the ones that represent things you would see, say, on a beach, into the empty space to the left?
By the time I’ve decked out that beach, the item, ticket or whatever I’m trying to buy online could be gone. Then it’s straight back to the drawing board for the same old drill all over again. Arrrggghhh!
Verification is, of course, an important safeguard when it comes to bank accounts and other financial areas of our lives. Scamming and hacking are no laughing matter, and we need to keep our wits about us.
But having to jump through all those hoops in so many areas of the online world is exhausting, time-consuming and often unnecessary.
It never seems to end. Verify this and verify that, enter the number sent to your email, rewrite the squiggly words, add two plus two, tick to confirm you’re not a robot, spot the motorbikes/trees/traffic lights. Give me strength.
It’s enough to make you seriously consider storing a stash of cash under the mattress and going back to shopping in those buildings on our streets called shops.
Are they real? Yes. Are they staffed by humans? Yes. On your bike, Captchas.