simple challenge of differentiating human from non-human automated clients (great podcast as always .. check it out). Commonly this is done with distorted text like the sample on the right. The Official CAPTCHA Site has a wealth of information about this field, including discussion of the relay attack that has the potential to defeat any "are you a human?" test (because it enrolls unwitting human accomplices to do the work).
The coolest piece of work though is the reCAPTCHA project. This is a project of the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University, and it provides a public service for plugging-in a CAPTCHA to your site. But unlike other systems that are just wasting 10 seconds of your time, this system is actually digitizing public domain archives at the same time (getting you to fix the translation of words that have defied the best OCR software)!
Perl is one language that you can easily use reCAPTCHA with, using Andy Armstrong's Captcha::reCAPTCHA module.
After installing the module, it just takes a few minutes to register your site and setup a test page. I built a quick reCAPTCHA cgi in perl .. you can try it out here (sorry, currently may find it offline but get the script source here: myReCaptcha.pl. I think I spent 10 minutes setting this up, and then an hour playing with it;) All in the name of digitizing historical works...
But I'm afraid the humour archive has the best captcha ever ..
