43. What is Captcha ?
The captcha is the "jumbled" set of letters and numbers you see while signing up for a service or filling an Enquiry form on a website etc. In other words, its the difficult part of a sign up or Enquiry process. Its called a captcha code, where you see an image with a set of numbers and alphabets which you are expected to enter in a field below or alongside the code.
Typing in this code helps recognise you as a human who is interacting with the web page / application. This simple action stops businesses from being exploited by automated systems, thus reducing marketing wastage and ensuring better ROI.
Essentially CAPTCHA is a verification code, used to reduce abuse and spam by verifying that an account is being accessed by a real person instead of a malicious computer and/or spammer.
ICAPTCHA, the short form 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. The first CAPTCHA was developed to be used by Yahoo.
