Can anyone explain why these security verification things insist on distorting the assigned password or attempt to make it slightly illegible? I mean, why don't they just give you the password and go on about business? EXAMPLES:
They are trying to prevent people from writing scripts to create a lot of e-mail accounts that can be used for spamming. While it is easy for people to recognize the passwords, it is difficult for a computers to recognize them.
The distortion makes it harder for optical character recognition (OCR) software to recognize the text.
I could use an automated test tool (as an example) to create thousands of logins with little effort on my part. The squirrely characters need to be validated and the OCR of most automated scripting tools would be thwarted by it. There have been cases when I looked at the wavy characters and hell, *I* couldn't figure out what they were...
