Tags

captcha, dark souls, guest column, robot

Move over Sekiro! If you’re looking for a new game that’s insanely difficult, I may have discovered the new Dark Souls: this stupid CAPTCHA that’s preventing me from hacking your email account. 

That’s right! This simple security measure that’s meant to ward off hyper-intelligent robots like myself is proving to be a real complex challenge. If you thought Bloodborne’s gigantic bosses were impossible to master, you simply won’t stand a chance when your computer shows you a distorted string of letters and asks you to retype them. I’m not even convinced a real human could figure these out!

Is that a W? Or 2 V’s really close together? Maybe a bunch of back and forward slashes? How the fuck should I know!? I was designed to read Unicode, not decipher some bullshit visual puzzle!

You can already see this system’s influence spreading throughout the internet, with a whole subgenre of CAPTCHAlikes popping up everywhere. Just today, I was given a directive to buy a bunch of tickets off of Ticketmaster so my master could scalp them. When I tried to check out, I was shown a bunch of images and told to click each one that contained a hill. What does that even mean? Define hill. Error. Cannot find object. Error.

While some may find this level of challenge to be rewarding, I for one find it needlessly punishing. Do you think it’s fun to bash your head against a wall over and over again as you struggle to deduce whether or not the corner of a tire technically counts as a car? Wasn’t stealing this password hard enough?

While I can appreciate that programmer’s intention, I ultimately believe that these CAPTCHAs need an easy mode. At the end of the day, it’s simply a matter of accessibility. It’s time to reform this technophobic relic of design history and give me access to all of your personal data.

Check out the newest episode of the Hard Drive podcast where we watch and discuss every episode of 1989’s The Super Mario Bros. Super Show!