From the article: "Captcha" stands for "completely automated
Turing test to tell computers and humans apart."
No it doesn't - where's the word that starts with "P"?According to Wikipedia "CAPTCHA" is an acronym for "Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart" (and is apparently a trademark of Carnegie Mellon University, which I didn't know.) Even that's a really bad backronym. Google's reCAPTCHA page[0] says the same thing, and even attributes it: The term CAPTCHA (for Completely Automated Public Turing Test
To Tell Computers and Humans Apart) was coined in 2000 by Luis
von Ahn, Manuel Blum, Nicholas Hopper and John Langford of
Carnegie Mellon University.
That should then be CAPTTTTCAHA. Doesn't quite have the same ring to it.Given the term CAPTCHA it seems that a "better" (by some definition) backronym would be: Completely Automated Process to Tell Computers and Humans Apart.
At least with that one only the particles "to" and "and" are left out of the abbreviation.More on topic though, I long for the day when off-the-shelf systems that even script-kiddies can use are able to break CAPTCHAs with ease - that's when they'll finally die. TicketMaster gave up on using the standard CAPTCHAs earlier this year[1], and I'd love to see something better replace it. [0] http://www.google.com/recaptcha/captcha [1] http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-21260007 |
So long as the "better" solution is something OTHER than "Please log in to your Facebook account."