Recaptcha

[sir archely]

This is a bit out of date, but it's still kind of interesting....and problematic?

recaptcha

Basically, instead of captcha text boxes being meaningless text, instead they are using you to decipher text of old books that cannot be scanned to digital form properly.

Okay, on the surface, after you watch the video, it seems neat. But then... if the computer doesn't know what the text is before you put it in, how the hell is it screening you? Either the captcha has already been deciphered and the computer knows what you should put in, or it hasn't and anything you put in will be okay and this is not an effective barrier. or something? what am i missing here?

edit: i suppose the computer could have a list of possible answers, and it's using aggregate data from the inputs in order to narrow it down. of course, even though this makes the captcha useful, it does seem to make it a less effective barrier.

[Corvus Corax]

I have the same doubts about this.

Although maybe it's a computer generated list that has been altered by that same computer to be even less comprehensible to other computers....?

So, the computer scans two words, has a list of possible sollutions, adjusts the words in a slight way so it can not recognise them as being in said list.

Although, this is just me guessing. There might be other ways to get that to work. If not, this is a pile of dribble.

Who knows, next thing you know you'll be decrypting extra terrestrial code to gain access to the quill .

Edit: Just read this comment and that makes sense as well

"There are two words for each test: one known, one unknown. (You don't know which one is which.)

The known one is the "real" captcha, the unknown one helps with digitizing books."

[Mike]

We used it on the registration page. As CC says, it's based on two words, one is known, the other isn't. If you have the known word right, then you're allowed through, and your translation for the unknown word is forwarded to the recaptcha project, where I guess it gets crosschecked with other translations of the same phrase.

Anyway, we don't do recaptcha's anymore as it's not enough to keep the baddies out. Now we use image verification, which uses several font types, and some of those are quite exotic and somewhat unreadable.

[sir archely]

yay, mike knows all.