A CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart) has been added to the new user registration page so I thought I would take this opportunity to discuss them.

Alan Turing is one of my favorite mathematicians he was an extremely interesting human (although he firmly believed he was a robot) and I would recommend A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines by Janna Levin to anyone even remotely interested in the history of computers.

To boil it all down…

In Turing’s work with artificial intelligence he forsaw a time when it would be necessary to tell computers apart from humans. He predicted a world where a machine that could tell human from robots would be important. That world was closer then he thought. Monitoring the packets that are hitting a firewall we see a great deal of packets generated by automatic systems, zombies, and port scanners. Reality is we deal the automated systems designed to imitate humans every day, referred to further as bots. It is the job of the people who control these bots to procure assets for use in various criminal enterprise. I hope to get more in-depth in a future botnet article. So any publicly accessible system (such as a website) that allows for input from the user could potentially be used by bots unless we filter them out in some way…

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