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What is CAPTCHA? It stands for Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart. It is a test that assists a computer in telling the difference between humans and machines, that has been trademarked by Carnegie Mellon University. With CAPTCHA a computer can detect whether a machine or a person completed a test, and discard any computer answers. The idea is that while as humans we can make out a series of distorted letters and numbers, a machine will not be able to make sense of such images. To learn more about how the program works you can visit http://www.protectwebform.com/. There is also a site for our more advanced version of the program at http://www.protectwebform.com/smartcaptcha. Having a CAPTCHA installed can protect against bots, which are programs that can repeatedly spam inboxes, try to post and retrieve personal information in chatrooms, and also try to get e-mail addresses and other information to use for promotions to sell services or items, or sign you up for numerous free mail services. The bots create worms that can cause immense harm to your machine. They crack your passwords, assault privacy and use your personal information for commercial use without your permission. You can use a CAPTCHAS or a CAPTCHA plug-in (http://www.protectwebform.com/plugin_wordpress) to stop these bots from taking over your system. Many sites of all sizes have installed these. Once the CAPTCHA is running as bots try to get into your system, they will be asked to type out a distorted image shown on the screen. Since computers can rarely translate these messy images into letters as humans can, it can stop the bot. you may have seen a CAPTCHA when logging onto your mail service, into a chatroom, or onto your bank website. Spammers send unsolicited, undesirable and unwarranted messages in bulk to your inbox. Besides that, there can be other spam too in the form of usenet newsgroup spam, log spam, search engine spam and the like. The reason why advertisers resort to spamming is because it does not cost much. They have to bear only the cost of managing the list of individuals that are targeted to receive the mails. Moreover, you cannot hold the sender accountable for the mass mailers they send. Spamming has become really ubiquitous since there are no entry barriers. No wonder your inbox is always flooded with mass mailers. Usenet spam is a message that can be sent to twenty or more Usenet newsgroups. This kind of spam floods the newsgroups with unnecessary advertisement and posts. It also challenges your ability to accept and manage the topics on the system. Another kind of spam, which is a little more expensive, is the instant message spam. In this case, advertisers have paid a little more to get a hold of a list of instant messaging ID's and then sent messages directly to those people.
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Oleg is an expert on CAPTCHA design and development. Click to learn more about his new CAPTCHA Plugin technology.
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