I haven’t yet posted anything about my new job at Atlassian. Hopefully I will get around to it soon, but in the meantime, here’s a funny email thread amongst the Confluence developers that Charles also posted on the developer blog.
We recently upgraded the Atlassian intranet to a pre-release build of Confluence 2.2. In the spirit of eating our own dogfood, we turned on the new CAPTCHA support, even though it’s completely unnecessary on a private wiki. This led to the following internal email conversation:
Jonathan:
Captcha on page create is INCREDIBLY ANNOYING. They’re very easily mis-interpreted. I am generally pretty good at this sort of thing, and I keep getting words wrong.
Tom:
Hi, Jon.
Looking at the ‘engines’ jcaptcha uses they are all pretty tough. Perhaps we need to find an easier one.
Jonathan:
Wow. No kidding. Those are hard.
Generally, I vote for the ones that use real words instead of random-pseudo-word-like-things. The brain is pretty good a filling in the blanks to construct words — in fact, people often read just by recognizing the shape of a word. However, if you have a word-like shape that’s not actually a word all of that hard-wired, human-specific reading ability goes for naught.
Matt:
Using real words means you can use an automated dictionary attack (or OCR combined with dictionary), thus rendering it useless.
Personally, I’m in favour of a variation on kitten-auth called ‘hoff-auth’. I’m sure Jens can provide us with enough pictures.
Jeremy:
I second that suggestion! The customers will love it. 😉
I can see the caption now: “Click 3 pictures of the sexiest man alive to submit”
Tom:
And all of the pictures which weren’t the Hoff would be Chuck Norris
Matt:
That makes sense. Noone clicks on Chuck Norris and lives.
Chris:
I’m sorry but nine pictures of the Hoff and Chuck Norris together would be too much Awesome for any application.
Update 18 Jan 2021: included and reformatted content from the Atlassian dev blog, which is now garbled and unreadable.
