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May 25, 2007
Stop spam. Read books
That's the tagline of reCAPTCHA, an ingenious piece of software that takes an exisiting application and makes it better. Anybody who's spent more than a few hours online has run into a CAPTCHA, short for Completely Automated Turing Test To Tell Computers and Humans Apart. CAPTCHAs are used to prevent spam and other undesirable activity. The image near the top of this entry is an example of a basic CAPTCHA.
The creators of reCAPTCHA estimate that about 60 million of these CAPTCHAs are solved every day. At 10 seconds per CAPTCHA, that translates to about 150,000 hours of wasted work each day. Why not put this wasted work to use?
reCAPTCHA does just that. In a joint effort with the Internet Archiveand their massive book-scanning project, reCAPTCHA takes pieces of text that can't be read by scanning software and uses them in a traditional CAPTCHA interface. Once the person on the user side keys in the text, the "translated" data is sent back to the Internet Archive.
Posted by AnthonyMcMullen at May 25, 2007 1:59 PM
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Comments
Sounds like a great way to put that effort to work.
Posted by: Dennis G. Jerz at May 28, 2007 10:39 AM