Spam gotcha

Those wavy wierd letters that one is required to type into many website forms to verify that one is a human? They have a name: CAPTCHA, that is, Completely Automated Public Turing Test to Tell Computers and Humans Apart.

Unfortunately, the HALs of our word have recently cracked the code.

Microsoft and other Web companies say that they are interested in creating human verification tests that are harder for computers to crack. But there's an inherent difficulty.

Making the tests harder for the computer makes them harder for humans, too.

Unfortunately , because we'll be getting a lot more spam email until a newer, better spamtrap CAPTCHA can be developed.

The Turing reference in the acronym is to Alan Turing, a British mathematician, who defined a computer as thinking when it would be able to conduct a conversation as if a human, undetected as a computer.