Comments on: Shin Aleph Kaph: LinkedIn Captcha Fail

By: Jon Daley

Jon Daley — Tue, 05 Oct 2010 15:58:39 +0000

Interesting idea to scan your own material. I don’t see any references to people doing that. (though I learned two things in my searching: 1. google bought recaptcha, and 2. it started at CMU)

By: IrishOboe

IrishOboe — Mon, 04 Oct 2010 12:25:19 +0000

What wasn’t clear to me until I read about reCAPTCHA on their site http://www.google.com/recaptcha/learnmore is that the reason why they want you to teach them words they don’t know is that reCAPTCHA is converting scanned written documents into digital text so that the archived material can be searched and used online. Imagine if Mom could scan Grandpa’s diaries, make each of us use a recaptcha everytime we visited her website and then bit by bit the diaries could be typed up with hardly any work. Unfortunately, it doesn’t look like reCAPTCHA lets you scan your own documents, but I find it an interesting use of manpower while serving a double function.

By: Jon Daley

Jon Daley — Mon, 04 Oct 2010 06:57:07 +0000

The recaptcha is supposed to be better than the old ones, though I see that from the FAQ, ( http://www.google.com/recaptcha/faq ), they actually purposely show you one word they don’t know, in the hopes that you will teach them what that word actually is. And then if you get the first word wrong, they’ll then show you two words that they do know what they are, so then they can prove that you do know what you are talking about.

And if you get both words wrong, they’ll assume you are a spammer, and keep making the words harder to read from your IP.

So, since it is a learning system, it’s better than a regular captcha, but they annoy me, as I often fail them myself.

By: SursumCorda

SursumCorda — Thu, 16 Sep 2010 00:19:23 +0000

Maybe it was an either-or.