ReCaptcha - My Recent Crush
Spam nearly killed me. I asked for help. Someone suggested “Hey you Jelly Bean; just try reCaptcha”
I obeyed. I started using reCaptcha. Nothing I found unusual about it. It was just like thousands of Captcha programs available. But my brain started to Round-Round. Actually the Tag line was disturbing me which reads “STOP SPAM. READ BOOKS”
So one day I decided to give a read. Oh god!!! This idea is “Brilliant”
Okay, here is in short what the hell they are doing damn good.
They are digitizing books using OCR (Optical Character Recognition). Mean they are scanning the books. But if you are familiar with OCR programs, you know, they can’t read everything correctly. But what the good thing they do, they tell us “umm, I can’t read this.”
Here comes the reCaptcha in action. The stuff; OCR software can’t read is being sent to us as Captcha and we are solving it. Simple! You got the story.
No, Oh God!
Say I am using Captcha on my site. Every time you post a comment on my site or do a login, a random image is fired on you having an alphanumeric string to fill in. Just to make sure that you are not a Machine but Human. If you will enter the provided string correctly you would able to log in, post a comment or whatever.
If I will use reCaptcha on my site instead on general captcha script the image or verification code you will get is actually what the OCR software can’t read. So those particular words are being provided to human to solve, get spam sorted and used in digitizing the book.
Enough. I can't elaborate more.
One last question you would like to ask. If the machine/software can’t read the word how it will verify the user has entered it correctly. Good question. You are intelligent.
Okay, know more.
09.01.2008. 22:44
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