Text-based captchas have gone from distorted words to random strings that once appeared somewhere online, often distorted to the point that multiple letters overlap completely. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve had to hit the “give me another one” button on popular systems, because the first several choices were impossible.

Today’s new low: “ryōhei,”. I haven’t tried to type this in Windows recently, but on a Mac, it can’t be done from the standard US English keyboard. You either have to look “ō” up in the Character Viewer, or switch to the Extended keyboard definition and remember that you compose it with Alt-A.