632: Suspicion
A character named Rob was chatting with a "Lisa" over the a few months, how would mention particular products every now and then, so he suspects she is really a bot engaged in product placement. This is a marketing practice of integrating brand names into non-advertising content in order pass the message while having the addressee's attention. While the recipient has a choice to ignore overt advertisementsignoring product placement messages would be tantamount to ignoring all the content they are embedded in. (Strangly, Wikipedia articles on product placement are only German, Romanian and Italian?)
So he wants to clarify "she" is human by presenting her a problem that is hard for computers to solve, but easy for a human with average sight abilities. Specifically, it is extracting text information out of an image, and the text is often distorted and embedded in graphical noise. These are known as Completely Automatic Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart, or CAPTCHA for short.
CAPTCHAs introduce problems on their own: e.g. if blind users are presented only a picture, they have (by definition) no way to convert it into a format they can process. Furthermore, due to progress in both algortihms and hardware, while bots can solve more and more CAPTCHAs, this is most certainly not true for humans. By the way, explainXKCD: these reCAPTCHAs sometimes give me a really hard time! I am a less-than-30-year-old, I believe my near sight view is good, I sit in front of a 14" SXGA screen (so single pixels are relatively large) and I only try one in four pictures so I keep my failure rate relatively low. I think they are overkill.
"Lisa" however is unable to answer, and fails to explain why that should be the case, and just resorts to pleads that "their love was real". Before disconnecting, she mentions two more brands and provides links to them, as depicted in the image text.
It is very strange, however, that she prevailed the illusion over several months. --46.142.61.98 10:08, 3 September 2012 (UTC)madd
