enter the characters you see

Hey, does anyone know anything about those boxes that appear that have encrypted letters and numbers and ask you to enter what you see. Sometimes you get it when you are filling out a form. I don't even know what they are called and I wanted to do a bit of research on them to see if I could use it on one of my pages.

thanks.

They are security images. They are there so that scripts and bots can't
fillout the form and submit it, as they would not be able to see the stuff
in the image.

http://www.devshed.com/c/a/PHP/Security-Images-in-PHP/

I heard about an interesting Hack concerning this system. Not sure if it's true, but it would be a pretty creative workaround.

Let's say that your looking to spam some forum or system that uses these images when registering new users. The hack involves taking the image and sending it to a porn site to users who are looking to sign up for a free account there. You take their translation, ship it back to the first and complete the registration.

Thanks for the info guys. But I guess that isn't what I really want.

I want to create something that varifies the person's identity without using a name and password. Usually we require a hand signature, but we can't do that because some people might not have access to scanners and it would be better to have it online. Any ideas?

Well I have not done anything with it, so I'm out on a limb here, but it seems like it would simply come down to a database filled with such pictures and an associated "translation" of the images. The db pops out an image at random, waits for the user to submit the answer, matches it back up against the db and your done.
So I guess the real question is what kind of pages/system are you running?

have you tried googling with the keywords biometric verifications ? i think this would be somewhere in that realm.. i dont think you'll get code, but you'll def. get ideas and implementaion details ..

one option that is not yet widely in use is identify person according to the speed he types... i.e. the intervals between each keypress or mouse click. it works like this:
1. when the user is registering, ask him/her to type 100 words freely, in their own style.
2. using client side code, record exact amount of time (miliseconds) between each key stroke.
3. when the user finish and click submit, you send the above recording and store it.
4. when the user is logging in, ask him to type 20-30 words in his normal typing style. according to the intervals between each storke you can identify if this is the same person.
I messed around with this when I still had time and got steps 1-3 done... however I failed in the final step because there will never be accuate results, and setting the correct ranges is very delicate task.
but I believe this can be used and you can get about 80% identification rate which is quite good - worst case, user have to type 20-30 words again.

biometric verifications require hardware and stuff, I can't see any hotmail user giving his finger/eye for scanning when logging in to see his emails...