ReadWriteWeb

The arms race between spammers, bots and publishers can drive the rest of us crazy too, and nowhere is that more evident than in the often maddening CAPTCHA challenges we have to jump through on many websites. Those squiggly lines run together and are too often impossible to identify. One company in Portland, Oregon believes their system of image based authentication could be used to replace traditional CAPTCHA systems.

Vidoop is a user authentication service provider that emphasizes financial services markets and OpenID. The company's core product lets users log in to sites by entering letters and numbers on top of images in a chart that only a human eye can identify; now Vidoop thinks it can apply the same principle to CAPTCHA. It's an intriguing possibility, as you can see below. It's not without controversy, however.