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Updated 63 Days ago
CAPTCHA: A Rant
I get it people; spammers are more annoying than Lamb Chop's "This is the song that doesn't end..." (For a reminder of just how annoying that is, click the Video tab) There are millions of robots and internet viruses that are out to hack into every possible thing within their reach, probably with some really great message like "I have a huge crush on you and a really hot body. Go to my site and we'll talk all night long." Those messages are really annoying when they do pop up, but a little thing called CAPTCHA is starting to annoy me more than the repetitive ramblings of hacking computers.
CAPTCHA used to just be reserved for a few secure websites that required you to enter in personal information about yourself, but that simplicity is long gone. You are now required to type in lengthy and warped digits to check e-mail, post comments, ask people to be your friend, join a new site, etc. - all of which is used to determine whether you're a computer or a homosapien.
At least the CAPTCHA here at ToastedRav elicits entries like "Wind Morton" and "Greenstein Decay." (And from my understanding, it's pretty understanding of a wrong letter or two.) I can handle being amused by a random pairing of words.
But when the words/letters/numbers get so jumbled up and warped in front of some crazy background that it gets to the point where I have to enter it five or six times before I can post a comment, I want to punch my computer screen. Are you kidding me? If the "o" is next to an "l" and the letters have all been made to look like a flowing stream, how the heck am I supposed to know that it's not a "d?" And don't even get me started on whether or not the case of the letters counts. Some CAPTCHA is case sensitive, but others are not, even though they use both cases in their crazy little security measure.
I'll be the first to admit that I know absolutely nothing about what goes into making a site secure for its users. If the internet is becoming so swamped with robots and the like that we now need CAPTCHA to perform practically every function while online, so be it. I might just have to get used to this necessary evil. But if you're going to make people tediously sit in front of their computers and type in "Te9#fdolQwBb76YePPa8St5@ytMmNOkj86Y543+BccaR57$Yuf" before they can do something as simple as send an e-mail (which they've already signed into with a password), at least put some thought into how accessible your CAPTCHA is in the first place. I'm thinking about boycotting the sites that I have to CAPTCHA more than once or twice.
Am I the only one who has to refresh the page eight times to figure out the cryptic CAPTCHA password?
About The Author:
I just moved back to The Lou from CoMo and I'd love to hear from you. Shoot me an idea/comment/bored rambling at audrey@toastedrav.com.I am also an expert at the Chicken Dance, and I am willing to give lessons for a small fee.
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The funny part is that I had to refresh the Captcha twice to post this.
What is reCAPTCHA?
reCAPTCHA is a free CAPTCHA service that helps to digitize books.A CAPTCHA is a program that can tell whether its user is a human or a computer. You've probably seen them Ñ 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 60 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.
To archive human knowledge and to make information more accessible to the world, multiple projects are currently digitizing physical books that were written before the computer age. The book pages are being photographically scanned, and then transformed into text using "Optical Character Recognition" (OCR). The transformation into text is useful because scanning a book produces images, which are difficult to store on small devices, expensive to download, and cannot be searched. The problem is that OCR is not perfect.
reCAPTCHA improves the process of digitizing books by sending words that cannot be read by computers to the Web in the form of CAPTCHAs for humans to decipher. More specifically, each word that cannot be read correctly by OCR is placed on an image and used as a CAPTCHA. This is possible because most OCR programs alert you when a word cannot be read correctly.
But if a computer can't read such a CAPTCHA, how does the system know the correct answer to the puzzle? Here's how: Each new word that cannot be read correctly by OCR is given to a user in conjunction with another word for which the answer is already known. The user is then asked to read both words. If they solve the one for which the answer is known, the system assumes their answer is correct for the new one. The system then gives the new image to a number of other people to determine, with higher confidence, whether the original answer was correct.
Currently, we are helping to digitize books from the Internet Archive and old editions of the New York Times.