Thursday, June 17, 2010

Now this is just plain creepy...

If you've used Ticketmaster to purchase or check the price of tickets, you know the drill: Before you're allowed to see what's available, you must go through a "security check" that involves typing two distorted words.

Oftentimes, the words generated by this computer server seem almost nonsensical. A sampling from not two minutes ago: "awareness be" ... "shutout business" ... "Danforth from" ... "for disables" ...

But does CAPTCHA ever generate a combination of words that doesn't seem so random?

While doing research for a Summer Concert Preview, this is the challenge-response test I was confronted with on Wednesday (snapped with my iPhone):


Most likely, this is one of the more unfortunate coincidences in the history of word-verification software. For Ticketmaster's part, they say: "We use a third-party provider for these, and we are going to look into this."

9 comments:

Anonymous said...

Alvin green wouldn't let this happen

hiprhyme said...

sometimes, when you type in the words for these security checkpoints, it ties in to some software and you are actually participating in re-typing a book into digital format. so it doesn't seemed far-fetched that you could have some related words pop up together.

i see that i have to do this exercise to leave a comment here. lol

Anonymous said...

It must be random. However, sometimes these things come out funny instead of offensive. One time on another website, the two words I had to type in to continue were "Engorged President." No lie. I have the screen grab to prove it.

Anonymous said...

Stop making something out of nothing. It doesn't say Columbine High. A columbine is actually a flower. So give it a rest. This is not newsworthy.

Anonymous said...

I'm sure I'm going to get the specifics wrong, but some captcha software doesn't randomly generate all of its words. As hiprhyme above mentioned, sometimes the words will be words of a text that weren't able to be read by an ocr reader (or something or other; as I mentioned -- sketchy on the details) and you're participating in clarifying them.

So perhaps this one was on the topic of the Columbine shooting.

Anonymous said...

I think I just read the most useless article ever published.

Anonymous said...

Quit being so PC ... it's rediculous.

ty_garfield said...

@ Anonymous you misspelled 'ridiculous'

Anonymous said...

Boring.....