Zane DeGraffenried

15th Oct 2009

reCAPTCHA

• Web Development
• Comments (0)

Slapped With Spam [Geek Warning!]

I recently signed on to my blog to see that I had been spammed over 300 times on my most recent blog post. I looked back in the archive of the comments and found that all the comment appeared to be coming from the same source about every three minutes for the last two days straight. I shut the website down temporarily stopping the comment spamming party and began sifting through various spam stopping options. reCAPTCHA instantly caught my eye.

A Little reCAPTCHA History [Geek Warning!]

reCAPTCHA is a free CAPTCHA service that helps to digitize books, newspapers and old time radio shows. Check out our paper in Science about it (or read more below).

A CAPTCHA is a program that can tell whether its user is a human or a computer. You’ve probably seen them — colorful images with distorted text at the bottom of Web registration forms. CAPTCHAs are used by many websites to prevent abuse from “bots,” or automated programs usually written to generate spam. No computer program can read distorted text as well as humans can, so bots cannot navigate sites protected by CAPTCHAs.

About 200 million CAPTCHAs are solved by humans around the world every day. In each case, roughly ten seconds of human time are being spent. Individually, that’s not a lot of time, but in aggregate these little puzzles consume more than 150,000 hours of work each day. What if we could make positive use of this human effort? reCAPTCHA does exactly that by channeling the effort spent solving CAPTCHAs online into “reading” books.

Source: What is reCAPTCHA

En Fin [Geek Warning!]

I had seen reCAPTCHA’s before but I never knew the idea behind their movement until I had a need to be free of spam. I thought that it was pretty cool that were able to take something monotonous and make it into something that could be used for the digitization of books. Now on this website not only can you comment without yucky spammers you can also help digitize books one word at a time. Luckily Alistair Kearney had made a beautiful symphony extension that was easy to install and get working. So scroll down to start digitizing books and making comments all at once.

After reading this article it sounded a little like a commercial. I am in no way affiliated with reCAPTCHA. I just simply thought what they were doing for the internet was cool.