Take that, Security man!

A few months back, I just happen to be in the living room when Steve was watching some inventor program. They were interviewing the man responsible for designing the common type of security passwords used throughout the Internet. You know, those where words (or jumbles of letters) are all squished, smudged, and elongated and you have to enter them correctly.

It was pretty interesting stuff. The inventor had to come up with a program that a computer would use to randomly create passwords that other computers couldn't figure out. Way cool, when you think about it.

Essentially, the computers takes its random letters or words and makes them a photo. Then the photo is ran through random filters that stretch, shrink, smear, wave, etc. Until the word is almost identifiable. No other computer can read them, but usually humans can. So up to this point, I thought this guy was AWESOME. Geeks rule!

Then, another organization contacted him about a different problem. They are attempting to convert millions of paper forms, books, newspapers and such into digital. But due to age, damage, or change in language, there are zillions of words that are not recognized by computers. Why? Because they are squished, smeared, wavy, etc. (Sound familiar?)

So, the guy comes up with the idea of using these unidentifiable words as part of the security system that's already been implemented on the web.

Each time you receive a window like the one below, one of the words is the actual security feature. The other word is some random piece of text that you are deciphering for them FREE OF CHARGE.



I'm pretty damn sure someone is getting paid for deciphering these words, but it's not me. The words are electronically fed as photos to the computer, who submits them alongside the actual security password. Whatever you key in the second box is accepted as being true, since the computer never knew what the word was anyway.

Those of you with evil minds already know where I'm headed.

The next day, when a security window come up with the two words. The first word I keyed in correctly, the second I didn't. It was accepted. I've done this every time since then. You can't leave it blank, but the computer has NO WAY of knowing if what you are keying in is correct or not.

Sure, some day, I'll be reading an electronic version of a newspaper (not) and come across some gibberish instead of an actual word. But you know what, it won't bother me. I'll just smile.

Take that, Security man!