It happened in Chile. Journalists wanted to buy tickets for Daddy Yankee’s concert, but they did not pass the web test and went viral .
Captchas are tests made to prevent bots from overloading a website, so, in the case of virtual ticket sales, they are more than necessary. In theory, they are simple, but they can cause chaos on live television, as in this case from Chile.
Taking advantage of Cyber Day, hosts of a news program on Channel 13 in Chile tried to buy tickets for Daddy Yankee’s concert on the air , in the midst of the great euphoria that the reggaeton player has in the country.
However, they found themselves with a test to overcome: a captcha to prove that you are not a robot. Did they get over it? Do not.
Are they robots?
In a video that has gone viral on social networks, you can see the two drivers fighting against the test that asked them to select bicycles, buses and cars from a series of images.
Periodismo vivencial pic.twitter.com/6Av0RA8Dwa
— Televisivamente (@Televisivamente) May 19, 2022
What was the problem? The drivers did not realize that they had to press all the images with the vehicles, when they only selected one of them.
Created by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University in 2000, the acronym CAPTCHA stands for Fully Automated Public Turing Test to Tell Computers From Humans.
Those pesky quizzes we have to take to review e-commerce websites are, in fact, modified versions of the Turing tests, which were designed by pioneering computer scientist Alan Turing to distinguish between humans and machines.
Luckily for these drivers, captchas may no longer exist in the future . The company Cloudflare has announced a couple of alternatives to this mechanism, thus testing physical keys or fingerprints. A few months ago, even Mark Zuckerberg himself suffered with them .