Japanese Captcha
Captcha is the fancy name used for those distorted images of text that you must type when signing up for things on the web. The other day I was signing up on Japanese online video sharing site fc2.com (don’t ask me why!) and noticed a completely different type of Captcha being used.
Captcha used in fc2.com
Basically the image is spelling out a series of numbers that the user has to type in. Luckily it is in Hiragana (which I can read) and it is all numbers. This one reads 807355. On the one hand, I find this approach rather novel as it poses yet another strong obstacle against evil sign-up bots and their masters, on the other hand it is yet another example of something that is totally specific to the Japanese market and can’t be used anywhere else without modification.