When CAPTCHA goes wrong ...

I was using a website today and they wanted to make sure I was human and not some automotronic roboform hell-bent on spamming the Intra-Web with ... well ... who knows what the kids are spamming for today with their rock-and-roll music and dual-core processors.

To demonstrate their Web 2.0 prowess they were using the single most reliable proof mechanism currently available.

CAPTCHA.

What's that you say?  Surely you know CAPTCHA.

Completely Automated Process To Cause Human Anguish.

Something like that.

It's where they show you a picture of some letters at odd angles with curved lines and then you get to ask yourself "Is that a lower case 'ell' or a sans serif upper case 'eye'?" or "Is that a zero or 'oh'"?  Then you type what you think it might be and you pray that you were right otherwise you will lose what you just typed because websites invest more time in making their captcha wicked-awesome instead of having their forms repeat data when captcha fails.

Let's not even get into accessibility issues (on an related note, I recently saw a captcha that also generated an audio recording of the letter stream with no form of noise added in - this made me wonder how hard it would be to have voice recognition software just use the audio stream to automate the captcha bypass).

Anyway ... this is a long-and-drawn-out way to show you the worst captcha I've gotten yet:

That's

Just

Ridiculous.

I did figure out what the valid captcha was ...