A brief rant about CAPTCHA's and ReCAPTCHAs

To me this is a good case study in and of itself, but since I'm neither an academician, nor do I get research money to do so, I'm going to briefly say why optical-obfuscation CAPTCHAs, in general, should be mercy-killed.

1. It's mainly an anti-OCR measure, but, the smarter OCR clients get, the more convoluted the challenge words get. Soon enough, it'll be so convoluted that a human won't be able to discern the characters.

2. It's a bad user experience if just about everywhere they go, they have to type CAPTCHA codes (specially if they're annoyingly obfuscated)

3. There HAS TO BE a much better way to tell humans and computers apart. I refuse to believe that OCR (for web UIs) is the most optimal solution to combat automatons. Humans have the emotional and cognitive abilities to be able to respond challenges that even sophisticated AIs cannot, so why not use that to develop a solid system that doesn't involve brute-force obfuscation of optical characters?

/rant