The fight against robots is resumed

After deleting a dozen highly complimentary, yet entirely automated, comments from anonymous users I've been forced to turn comment verification back on. That's the annoying little word that a person has to read and type when posting to verify that they are indeed human. That little word is called a captcha, an acronym for completely automated public Turing test to tell computers and humans apart and is one of many tools in fighting automated spam.

The purpose of this robospam is to drive up the Google PageRank of the linked page, making it appear higher in Google's search listings. But the joke's on them: since this tiny webpage doesn't have any PageRank (no other pages listed in Google link to it) linking from us actually hurts them a small amount. Nevertheless, spam is annoying and thus the need for a captcha.

My favorite captcha (yes, I do have a favorite captcha... you will too) is the KittenAuth project, a anti-robot tool that has the human user select 4 particular cute animals (such as kittens, piglets and even baby hedgehogs) out of a group of 12 cute animals. The project is still being developed, but as soon as it can be integrated it into pikamac.com, I know it will be.