Computer Literacy Tests Are You Human By Lev Grossman Every文档.doc

Computer Literacy* Tests: Are You Human? By Lev Grossman Every web surfer, in the course of his or her browsing, has been forced to stop and perform this weird* little task: look at a picture of some wavy*, ghostly*, distorted letters and type them into a box. Sometimes you flub* it and have to retype the letters, but otherwise you dont think about it much. That string* of letters has a name; its called a CAPTCHA. And its a test. By correctly transcribing it, you have proved to the computer that you are a human being. This electronic hoop* you have to jump through was invented in 2000 by a team of programmers at Carnegie Mellon University. Somebody at Yahoo! had gone to* them, complaining that criminals were taking advantage of Yahoo! Mail--they were using software to automatically create thousands of e-mail accounts very quickly, then using those accounts to send out spam. The Carnegie Mellon team came back with the CAPTCHA. (It stands for* completely automated public Turing test to tell computers and humans apart; no, the acronym doesnt really fit.) The point of the CAPTCHA is that reading those swirly* letters is something that computers arent very good at. If you can read them, youre probably not a piece of software run by a spammer. Congratulations--you can have an e-mail account. The CAPTCHA caught on*, and now its all over the Web. Luis von Ahn, an assistant professor at Carnegie Mellon who was part of the original CAPTCHA team, estimates that people fill out close to* 200 million CAPTCHAS a day. But you should pause when you see one--its one of the rare moments when the invisible war being waged* between spammers and programmers becomes visible to you, the prey. Of course, says Von Ahn, this has been a little bit of an arms race with spammers, because now theres a huge incentive* for spammers to try to get around* CAPTCHAS. You can bypass them, using brute force, for example, though itll cost you. Go to a website like GetAF and youll see dozens of ads place