Ticketmaster has announced that it will be dropping the always annoying CAPTCHA security system from its website thus ending minutes of “what the hell does that say” whenever you buy some tickets from the world’s largest ticketing retailer.
It’s long since been the bane of internet users everywhere when the CAPTCHA system appears but its even more annoying when you are booking time-restricted tickets for the next big gig. The switch has already been made to a new security system made by Solve Media which now presents questions or well-known phrases to translate instead of the CAPTCHA system where you would have to make out two nonsensical words and type them out.
CAPTCHA – which stands for Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart – was developed by Carnegie Mellon University in 2000. It was introduced to stop automated spam bots from posing as human users when checking out on an online store, or entering sensitive information.
When the service initially launched it was easy to use and to read the words displayed but as technology has moved on the words have become more and more hard to decipher, which leads to even the most veteran internet user with perfect sight squinting at the screen trying to decipher the code!
One thing we will miss though is the amazing updates on captchacomics.com which takes the words displayed in the boxes and uses them to form a simple but funny comic book.
Whilst CAPTCHA will still be about it has now lost a very big supporter in Ticketmaster.