Like many things that starts out as a mere annoyance, though eventually growing into somewhat of an affliction. One particularly dark and insidious thing has more than reared its ugly head in recent years, and now far more accurately described as an epidemic disease.
I'm talking about the filth that is reCAPTCHA. Yes that seemingly harmless question of “Are you a human?” Truly I wish all this called for were sarcastic puns of 'The Matrix' variety but the matter is far more serious.
Google describes reCAPTCHA as:
[reCAPTCHA] is a free security service that protects your websites from spam and abuse.
However, this couldn't be further from the truth, as reCAPTCHA is actually something that causes abuse. In fact, I would go so far as to say that being subjected to constant reCAPTCHAs is actually an act of human torture and disregard for a person's human right of mental comfort.
Back in the 90s a bunch of smartasses realised that money was to be made and much time saved by programming bots to do everything for them online. Some bots were good and helpful and finished things quickly and easily for everyone involved and others were used to send spam and even caused some websites to crash or suffer lag due to repeated use.
For a time websites employed easily defeated methods for trying to prevent such abuse by making anyone who visited/accessed 'x' do 'y' thing. Mostly these preventative methods were something stupidly easy for even a computer/bot to solve and did little to stop spam and misuse except prevent access from those only computers/bots that didn't have a method of solving such simple problems.
To solve what was (at the time) an epidemic in and of itself of bots, reCRAPCHA was born. Google came to the rescue of all, as was arguably their responsibility because they were the ones taking it up the rear the hardest from such bots.
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