I came across this variation in the way you can test if the person interacting with your software is flesh rather than machine.

The standard Captcha mechanism is those distorted letter you often see. The idea is have something that humans can easily read and computers find very difficult.

BTW The term “CAPTCHA” was coined in 2000 by Luis von Ahn, Manuel Blum, Nicholas J. Hopper, and John Langford (all of Carnegie Mellon University). It is an acronym based on the word “capture” and standing for “Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart… from Wikipedia.

Images of the pointer cursor and the pointing hand (Macintosh). They are png files ready to use. I can’t count the number of times that I’ve had to create these images, so here they are ready to grab in my handy dandy blog.