LinkedIn has recently added a Captcha to its security elements. I remember Jon saying that Captcha had outlived its usefulness: I think the following screenshot of a recent Captcha LinkedIn showed me confirms that. I entered what is in the input field and the Captcha passed me.
Maybe it was an either-or.
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.
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.
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)