Jon Udell writes about how the beating-the-bot technique of captchas is now getting beaten by the bots by some very innovative methods:

I’d heard of the ESP game, but hadn’t realized that it was inspired by an attack on CAPTCHA in which spammers get porn-site visitors to classify images:

Someone designed a software robot that would fill out a registration form and, when confronted with a CAPTCHA test, would post it on a free porn site. Visitors to the porn site would be asked to complete the test before they could view more pornography, and the software robot would use their answer to complete the e-mail registration.

This shows why the picture puzzles in some websites seem to have gotten tougher. I just have to take my hat off to the ingenuity of the human brain which has always found a workaround for every problem it is confronted with!

Wonder there will be another huge hoopla over standardization of web identities a la distributed authentication as practiced by Drupal?