Retro Yakking

Foreword: Oh dear. I let Harry Yack out of his cage for the weekend and he goes on a rant about geeky internet stuff that not many people care for.

You’ve probably got more important things to do on bank holidays, like collect your savings from the post office, or whatever, so I shall leave you with the first in a soon-to-be-regular (?) series entitled Bank Holiday Bunkum, as authored by Harry Yack. Read it and get bored weep.

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Since the dawn of… the project, reCAPTCHA has proven itself to be an almost essential internet security measure, preventing malicious spammers and bots from accessing vulnerable parts of websites net-wide.

But just how useful is it? Sure it has helped to translate paper-based books into ultra-modern, state-of-the-art e-books with its handy OCR technology, but elsewhere it is a complete and utter pain.

Yes, you heard me. It can be rather annoying. Take the following examples I have encountered over the past week.

Okay, the only part I could make out from the first word was “arse”. What’s this, an automated internet programme comparing my attempt to fathom its secret ‘code’ to a pair of buttocks? How very dare you! Oh, it’s on now, reCAPTCHA… And what sort of a word is ‘heedless’ anyway? I’m pretty sure that half the time it’s just making up words.

Don’t even get me started on this one. If anyone can guess what that second word is I will personally come round to their house and award them every last penny from my coppers jar. The best I could come up with was a feeble ‘criblastic’.

Quick fact: reCAPTCHA was actually invented by a Guatemalan. Really.

In conclusion, I suppose that for all its annoyances, reCAPTCHA is something of a necessary evil, as we’d all be lost without it. Probably. It’s one of those things you can’t live with, but couldn’t live without, just like out of that U2 song. Sunday Bloody Sunday. No, wait…

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