Verification images - WTF?
 

I totally understand the concept behind these things, quite brilliant actually, would love to own the patent on that....

What I do not understand is why some places that use them make them almost impossible to read. What is the point of that?

If you don't know what I am talking about, it's the images that appear when you are submitting a form, etc where you have to type in the letters/numbers that are in the image to verify that you are human and not a bot.

Its intended to stop automated bots which means it has to be somewhat hard to read.
WG

Somewhat? LOL...there are some out there that I can't read to save my life.
It reminds me of the NBA Jam game on the old Nintendo, the passwords when you got to a new level would be like 18-36 digits long...not like we were breaking into the NSA or anythign...LOL it was just a silly game.

captchas to all us laymen

Yeah - I know whatcha mean.

When you gotta ask yourself "Is that a 'Q' or a 'W'?" you know you're in trouble.

Just refresh the pages a few times until you get an easy one...

Ahhh, so the bots can read the images? I did not know that. How in the world does a bot read a graphic?

Play with the tool located here:

http://www.myfonts.com/WhatTheFont/

and you'll get an idea of the level of available technology.

Contrasts... You can get coordinates of varying degrees of contrasts in an image and determine a letter based on what the coordinates draw

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Captcha
A number of research projects have attempted (often with success) to beat visual CAPTCHAs by creating programs that contain the following functionality:

Extraction of the image from the web page.
Removal of background clutter, for example with color filters and detection of thin lines.
Segmentation, i.e. splitting the image into segments containing a single letter.
Identifying the letter for each segment.
Steps 1, 2, and 4 are easy tasks for computers. The only part where humans still outperform computers is segmentation. If the background clutter consists of shapes similar to letter shapes, and the letters are connected by this clutter, the segmentation becomes nearly impossible with current software. Hence, an effective CAPTCHA should focus on the segmentation.

The bots use "OCR" or optical character recognition to read the image file that is created. That is why the characters are so "randomized" and splashed with background noise. But yes some webmasters go a little overboard, after all no matter how much they try anything can be hacked... ;)

What I don't understand is why some Sponsors use them on the Affiliate sign-in.

It's just the "cool" factor.