For those not aware, “captcha” is the name given to the little images with distorted text. The premise is that a human can figure out what they say, but that a computerized “bot” cannot. Thus they’re used to keep people from writing scripts to sign up for hundreds of accounts, or to prevent spammers from leaving comments. (Incidentally, there are some clever ways to defeat captchas. The most creative was a group of people that apparently started a “free” porn site, where users only had to complete a captcha to sign up. Except that the captcha actually came from another site: they were essentially getting hundreds of porn-starved people to help them bulk-register for various accounts!)

Anyway, besides causing major problems for the visually-impaired, there’s another problem with captchas… Consider the one I got the first time I tried to sign up for Hulu: