So we’ve all seen our fair share of ridiculous CAPTCHAs. I’ve seen ones that require you to only enter the letters with the cats on them, or I’ve seen near undiscernable ones. And if you’ve ever listened to the audio CAPTCHA provided by Google, it’s like the disembodied voice of Satan himself beckoning you to discern exactly which numbers need entering, if only you’ll denounce your Lord. Spoken backwards. It’s ridiculous.

So imagine my shock when Ticketmaster provided me with the following:

catpcha

That’s right. A “vulgar fraction: seven eights.” Not wanting to shrink from a challenge, I pulled up Character Map and found U+21E: ⅞. So obscure it has no alt keystroke. Beat that with a stick, spammers.

(ReCAPTCHA, which provided this CAPTCHA, helps digitize books by providing OCR-unreadable words as one of the two words. If you get the known word right, it uses your entry for the unknown word to help them correct the mistakes in their books. The more people that validate an OCR “unreadable” word, the higher the confidence, until it’s accepted as accurate. But I’m guessing not many people dug up Seven Eighths for this one. :-)

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