LOS ANGELES — Local internet user Johnathan Von Pess was recently confronted with a photo of himself in a CAPTCHA image authentication puzzle titled “select all tiles containing LOSERS,” Von Pess confirmed in an interview.
“I’m not happy,” said Von Pess. “First of all, who was the person that made this thing? I want to know who to be mad at. Someone decided to take that Street View photo of me leaving a Burger King wearing my favorite Chinese Democracy tee-shirt—I have several, by the way—then someone else made the captcha out of it, and then someone else had the nerve to put this in front of me and make me call myself a loser. All so I could log back into my reddit account? That was not my day. I was the only person in the photo, too, though I don’t know if that would have made things any better or worse.”
Investigators were able to track down the person responsible for the CAPTCHA, a software engineer at Google who wished to remain anonymous. The employee claims that the “loser” example was part of a larger effort to make the ubiquitous anti-scraping puzzles less ambiguous.
“We’ve gotten a lot of complaints from users not sure about which tiles to click on if the partitions on the image are placed awkwardly,” said the anonymous source. “My boss was really on our case to make something that was easier for people to solve. We may have been in a bad mood because of that, but when the team saw this guy’s photo we all were like, ‘ugh, this guy sucks.’ He was wearing espadrilles with the playboy bunny logo on them. He had to have made those himself, right?”
Though Von Pess, in his own words, does not “know who to be mad at,” he had decided to sue Google for defamation.
In the interview, Von Pess rhetorically asked “I don’t think a loser would bring a multibillion-dollar multinational company to court, do you? Would a loser stick up for himself like that? I didn’t think so,” he said while putting on a pair of sunglasses and leaning back into his chair, quickly catching himself as his elbow slid off the side of his left armrest.
Despite Von Pess’ apparent confidence, LA county judge Robert George has dismissed the case in a statement saying, “get a load of this guy.”
