mcroft | Alan Turing would be rolling in his grave, if he were, indeed, a real person..

So someone has come up with a dubious use of Hot of Not's dubiously useful API.

The premise is simple. Captcha technologies are annoying and time consuming, but useful and accurate. By using something both subjective and unreliable, the latter two qualities can be removed completely.

The subjectivity is easy. If you don't like multiple piercings, or smokers, or redheads, you're not going to get this captcha right. If the dudes on the "Switch to men" side of the aisle don't do it for you (

immlass said "but the answer is 'none of them'"), you aren't gonna choose correctly. With text-based captchas, you can have problems because "1" and "l" may look alike. Here, if you get it wrong, it's because you're a deviant.

Now the trick here is that the code must also be poor: it relies on both hotcaptcha.com and amihotornot.com to be up and running, pictures are strectched to fit an arbitrary size regardless of proportions, pictures don't always return images or look good at the scale they use, the mechanism relies on visual representation (no Bobby Approval here!), and the frigging thing is 920 pixels across in your browser.

I think they achived the requirements perfectly. I commend all my friends to hotcaptcha.com as example of not just "how not to code", but "what not to code." It's nearly perfect.

Now if they'd just recode it to use kittenwar, it would be flawless.

ETA: KittenAuth, from the same site that I found this on in the firstplace: MonkeyFilter