How secure is too secure? Oh yeah, this is it.

I came across a great post over at Vitalsecurity.org the other day (part of the awesome Security Bloggers Network) about when security goes too far. RapidShare is a great solution for sharing large amounts of data. It’s ad and premium-user supported and allows for an unlimited amount of bandwidth (free users have 100MB file limit while paid users get 2GB file limit).

There are a few limitations or annoyances if you’re not a paid user. You need to wait a certain amount of time before downloading (usually less than 2 minutes), you can’t download more than one file at a time and the zinger is that you need to fill out a CAPTCHA in order to download files.

CAPTCHAs are not usually a bad thing except when you can’t read it! RapidShare requires you to choose the graphics that contain a cat but they are both difficult to read and worse off, not everyone knows what a cat looks like. It usually takes me two or three tries to download. I understand that they want to make it so that people need to make sure they’re human before they can download but their CAPTCHA requires a user to be super-human. That’s not a good way to draw in more people.

Security is important but this type of security is ridiculous.