Computers were supposed to make our life easier.
With the deluge of spammers these days, more and more websites are using Captchas.
Unforunately, because of fear that spammers have already conquered those, people are now using Recaptchas.
The problem was that spammers were using people to solve them. So even if there is a switch to Recaptcha, the spammers still succeed.
This is a recaptcha I personally encountered. These unreadable blobs are a common occurrence.
It sometimes infuriates me when I fail these a couple times in a row. In addition to making your internet experience even harder, you are being exploited by Carnegie Mellon University. They are using your labor to scan books that their computers can’t read.
Fortunately, you can just type in a single word, and leave the other one blank. However, you can’t tell if its the first or second word. But a 50/50 chance is good enough for me.
For fun, here is a list of 10 horrible captchas:
Emmett and I attended a lecture by Luis von Ahn, the inventor of reCAPTCHA. He’s a MacArthur fellow (the genius grant) and needless to say his presentation was interesting and impressive, although he was a bit of an arrogant douche. He also invented the image game that google uses to tag pictures in their image search. His research involves projects like these that leverage “crowdsourcing”.
reCAPTCHA is kind of nice because it helps to digitize words in books which are unrecognizable to OCR. Kind of nice to think that whenever you fill out one of those things, you’re helping the “common good” by digitizing information. On the other hand, it can kind of be a pain in the ass so I see where you’re coming from. The implementation really isn’t quite right.
Posted by Andrew on August 12th, 2008.
Hey Andrew, thanks for visiting :P.
I heard about Luis von Ahn, and it seems strange how he gets all the fame for what is essentially a simple Turing test. I believe that someone else would’ve come up with it.
In Wikipedia it also states that Manuel Blum, Nicholas J. Hopper, and John Langford were also behind Captcha. I wonder why they don’t get as much press.
Also, it is funny they they tried to trademark it
http://tarr.uspto.gov/servlet/tarr?regser=serial&entry=78500434
It reminds me of Amazon’s one click patent.
Posted by Lorph on August 12th, 2008.
lorph:
glad to see you blogging once again…haven’t read your stuff in awhile. back in the day, lorph.skial.net was what i read every morning in first period along with the nytimes.
i totally feel your pain reCAPTCHA. last month, i encountered a website where i failed like three of them in a row and my brothers laughed at me terribly. someday, they will feel my pain as well and feel sheepish. until then, i had to deal with their sniggers and i felt marginalized by this stupid security technique.
keep the blogposts rolling.
Posted by bigindia on August 20th, 2008.