Critique Wall.com

Captcha

According to the Wall Street Journal, "Captcha is an acronym for Completely Automated Public Turing Test to Tell Computers and Humans Apart. Computer scientists at Carnegie Mellon University coined the term in 2000 to describe codes they created to help Internet giant Yahoo Inc. thwart a spam problem. "Turing" refers to Alan Turing, a mathematician famous for his codebreaking work during World War II and, later, as a pioneer in artificial intelligence."

Hotmail Captcha

The purpose behind these extra steps is to prevent malicious software from filling out forms. But the result of the sometimes unappeasable Captchas is often annoyed users. In my experience, capchas hamper usability.