A CAPTCHA is a program that protects websites against bots by generating and grading tests that humans can pass but current computer programs cannot. The idea behind such a device is to prevent scripts, spammers, search engines and other unwanted automated visitors from getting behind your page, the most visited sites on the internet implement some kind of CAPTCHA (yahoo, facebook, myspace, hotmail, gmail etc).

Sounds sensible does it not? It is highly sensible except that it has developed into an arms race of sorts as news of the recent crackings of Gmail’s Captcha, Yahoo’s Captcha and frequent crackings of Hotmail’s Captcha show. What this means to the end user is that CAPTCHAs increasingly get harder to solve. Facebook was caught out by a particularly unfortunate CAPTCHA bug as shown below.

There are various alternate solutions being banded around such as Client Side Javascript CAPTCHAs and verbal reasoning (via 37Signals) tests. The prize for most imaginative so far has to be the image based effort by alipr.com which can be quite to be dificult to grasp the concept of first time around.

I don’t think any of the above efforts have yet proved to be a viable replacement and sadly I can only see the arms race waging on for a couple more years yet. Still RapidShare has sucessfully implemented the worst CAPTCHA I have ever had to deal with on a regular basis so far! Where will the madness end?

Correct. Every single page I visit when logged in is flanked by a Norwegian advertisement. My profile is not setup to mention Norway and I have 1 friend (About 0.25% of my total friend connections) who is in the Norway network so why, why, why are Facebook serving me adverts in Norwegian?

For a company who hope to paint themselves as one which will overtake Google as the online advertising specialists this is a serious problem? There has been a lot of hype surrounding Facebook recently and talk of it challenging Google, luring its much sought after employees away however to me this seems absurd.

Everything that Facebook does at the moment seems to smack of immaturity, possibly this is the result of Mark Z’s lack of real experience in Business. Many large internet companies today did indeed start off with a CEO who had no real business experience however that doesn’t necessarily mean that anyone can do it. Google employees seen leaving for Facebook will only be transferring for one reason: money. With Facebook’s recent valuation stock options can be seen to be as lucrative as the original Google options. Employees leaving to Facebook are not joining it because it is seen as the next bastion of the world’s academics (as Google is) but because they are on a gold rush.

Bottom line: Facebook is not in control of its own ascent, they are clinging on whilst the environment pushes them. Unless they begin to mature as a company they could spiral out of control and I would not want to speculate on what a desperate company might do with all our information if it came to hard decisions.