Rant - the 'human' detector that Ticketmaster, et al, uses

[Kneel B4 Zod]

Just tried to buy tix from Ticketmaster. I was faced with this puzzle. WTF?

The 2nd & 4th characters I could only take 50/50 guesses on. the 7th character looks like the 4th, but may or may not be different. I have no idea what the right answer actually is. I got it wrong, and was then faced with an equally difficult one. I got that wrong. Finally I was able to solve the 3rd.

WTF!!

is this really the best way to tell humans from bots - by presenting a visual test which I can't even get right half the time? PS I have 20/20 vision and a crisp LCD monitor

[guids]

2nd character is an 8

or a 6

or an s


4th character is easy, its a 2, or an upper case I, or a Z

[DZgroundhog]

D8P2N4Z?

[edfurlong]

D8PZN4Z?

[JasonK]

Second for D8P2N4Z.

[Mason Hellmuth]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAPTCHA

I agree that Ticketmaster's CAPTCHAs are [censored] terrible. However, some of them are much worse than others. I usually just keep reloading until I find one that's easy to figure out.

[edfurlong]

I like the ones that use zeros and O's. Brilliant.

[Guy Incognito]

The funny thing is, there is software that the ticket brokers use to automate buying that can bypass this thing roughly half the time.

[Flow73]

I never get those right on the first try, this one I did for some reason.

[BradleyT]

Captcha's are sometimes used in the strangest of places. I just did an ePassporte deposit to stars last night and had to do a captcha to complete the process. Damn you deposit bots.