Digital Media Strategist

CAPTCHA: Completely Automated Public Turing Test to Tell Computers and Humans Apart

That’s quite a mouthful, but even if you’ve never seen heard of a CAPTCHA before, I can guarantee you’ve used one. Here’s CAPTCHA image I swiped from Yahoo’s email sign-up page:

Yup, those terrible things! I don’t know about you, but I have a hard time solving many of the CAPTCHAs I come across. They are designed to stop spammers from writing programs that race through the web bulk-posting to blogs or snapping up millions of new Gmail accounts. However, when designing an image that is hard for a computer program to read, you often end up with something that is hard for legitimate humans to read as well. This annoys people while wasting their time – not a good combination.

Luckily, there’s a new solution to both of those problems: reCAPTCHA. This variation on the CAPTCHA uses whole English words as “human tests,” making it far easier to read than your average Yahoo or Ticketmaster CAPTCHA. In addition – and this is the really cool part – reCAPTCHA is ultimately not a waste of time. Sure, you still have to take a few seconds to type letter in a box, but these letters are taking advantage of the magnificent computing power of your brain for the benefit of humanity. This is because one of the two words you type in is an unknown word from a library digitization project. (more…)

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