Dogs

When Jared Bauman was asked to look at nine dog pictures and identify which ones were smiling as part of a captcha test to log in to a website a few weeks ...

“We’ve literally all been there through gritted teeth muttering: ‘Those were all the pictures with traffic lights,’” says Effie Le Moignan, research associate in social computing at Newcastle University, who calls the captcha era of the internet a “human-computer interaction atrocity.” A week after he was prompted to pick smiling dogs, Bauman was given a more mind-boggling task: to click images of horses made out of clouds. This kind of conundrum is becoming a bigger issue as captchas—tests designed to weed out robot web surfers from humans on websites—have grown increasingly cryptic.