Elitist CAPTCHA

I tried to sign up for correlate.us today, a rather nice-looking service that creates a ‘river’ of information from RSS feeds provided by the likes of Flickr, Last.fm and Twitter, so folk can view all your online activity in one place, complete with pretty graphs.

Unfortunately, I got caught by the CAPTCHA:

How charming to be considered non-human by a website just because I haven’t the faintest idea what ‘resolving’ some numbers in brackets even means, let alone how to do it.

Admittedly, I add up on my fingers and have to use a calculator for sums involving numbers of more than one digit, but it still seems horribly elitist to expect all users to have an A-level in maths before they’re allowed to use a site.

Update: for anyone wondering, the answer to min(8,5) is 5 and Joe who runs correlate.us kindly plans to change the CAPTCHA soon. Here’s my page on the site. For a more complete one-page summary of my recent faffing online, see Flow.

Posted at 4pm on 04/06/07 by Jack Mottram to the web category.
Permalink · Add to del.icio.us
Tags: maths, rants