What the hell is this ?

[Tender Branson]

I found this on the Newt Gingrich website:



Does the Newt campaign think Aliens (from space, not the Mexicans) can donate to him ?

Or is it a general safety measure to ensure that your pets are not accidentally donating 2500$ to campaigns by hitting the "enter button" while you went to the toilet and after you return from the toilet you actually don't want to donate 2500$ anymore to Newt ?

[True Federalist (진정한 연방 주의자)]

It's probably some Captcha-type gimmick to help keep bots from filling out the forms with fake donations.

[Hash]

Probably to keep Mitt Romney from inadvertently contributing to his campaign.

[angus]

The thing with the question mark?  Oh, I see stuff like that all the time.  Usually it's a sequence of letters and numbers in weird, melty fonts that are hard to read, and you're instructed to type them into a little dialogue box.  I think it's just to keep scripts from filling stuff out.  If you slide the bar or type in the correct sequence of numbers, then you must be for real, because they're done in a way that scripts can't manage.  (Sequence of number is random, or the position of the slide bar is mouse-driven and maybe randomly positioned.)

I suppose it's only a matter of time before even that gets hacked.

[Swing low, sweet chariot. Comin' for to carry me home.]

Probably to keep Mitt Romney from inadvertently contributing to his campaign.

LOL!  Good one.

[minionofmidas]

The thing with the question mark?  Oh, I see stuff like that all the time.  Usually it's a sequence of letters and numbers in weird, melty fonts that are hard to read, and you're instructed to type them into a little dialogue box.  I think it's just to keep scripts from filling stuff out. 

Yes, that's what Ernest called a "captcha".

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Which is why they've been becoming vaguely difficult to decipher even for humans of late.

[angus]

captcha?  geekspeak. 

Good.  I learned three new words today:  captcha, ginger, and daywalker.

[Swing low, sweet chariot. Comin' for to carry me home.]

captcha?  geekspeak. 

Good.  I learned three new words today:  captcha, ginger, and daywalker.

you watched Blade for the first time today?

[angus]

"Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart"

LOL.  I'm not usually a fan of acronyms, but in this case I think one was merited.

And in case you're wondering, Turing refers to Alan Turing, a mathematician and possibly a high-functioning autistic person who provided the formalism for computation. 

That's right, I've been studying up on this recently. 


Oh, jmfcst, it's funny that you mention Blade.  I watched it on an airplane ride from Boston to San Francisco about 12 years ago.  I remember it well.  I have a funny story about that trip, and about that movie, but it's a long story, and my long stories tend to be very long so I'll save it for another time.