Hotmail's sign-up page uses...Google's ReCAPTCHA service...whose images are sometimes unreadable

CAPTCHA or Completely Automated Public Turing Test To Tell Computers and Humans Apart, is a technique to to stop bots from signing up for online accounts or automatically filling up forms. It works on the assumption that Humans can understand distorted text presented in a CAPTCHA image but not bots which may have a basic training in OCR (Optical Character Recognition)

Hotmail's sign-up page uses Google's ReCAPTCHA service -

I found the words in the image-text that Google's reCAPTCHA presents so complicatedly warped that it felt like taking an eye test. Check these samples -

Does beating bots have to be such a big deal?

...and what's more Microsoft & we may unknowingly have become part of a Google's "experiment that involves using its reCAPTCHA spam-fighting system to improve data in Google Maps by having users identify things like street names and business addresses."

TechCrunch reports that some of the new reCAPTCHAs present an image where one side contains the warped text users are familiar with, while the other side shows a somewhat blurry (as if zoomed in) photo of numbers which may be as street names and traffic signs from Street View imagery.

Related:
Deciphering Old Texts, One Woozy, Curvy Word at a Time