Proof that history repeats itself, the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.

IBM’s Deep Blue became a legend of computer history in 1997, when it beat the world champion Kasparov at chess. (Apparently it’s now been pensioned off, with parts doing service as an airline booking database.)

Scale the skill level down exponentially. I see that, now, even spambots are better at filling in CAPTCHAs than I am.

According to the Register, “Spammers crack Gmail Captcha”

Using two compromised hosts,

” only one in every five Captcha-breaking requests are successful. It’s a fairly low percentage, but one that’s still more than workable in the case of automated attacks.”

Forget the “automated attacks”, that’s about double my success rate at getting the things to work.