Why do those security things have to be so hard to read?

What you are referring to is Captcha’s. Captcha’s are a program that can tell if the user is a human or computer. Since computer’s cannot read distorted text as well as humans can, this prevents automated spam bots from sending spam by filling out registration forms etc.

For more info go to reCaptcha

Good Luck!
R

The wikipedia article on Captcha provides more information than the reCaptcha site.

They’re designed to be hard to read so that other computers won’t be able to tell what the letters are. If they were easier to read, computers would be able to guess the letters.

I’ve noticed some of them are also putting them in audio format so people who have a hard time reading the letters can hear them instead.