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Shiva

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I just read that these squiggly letters and numbers that we have to copy in order to prevent the spread of spam can serve another function. As most books and old newspaper articles are being digitized through OCR (Optical Character Recognition) it frequently happens that computers can't be sure of the letters, so they send them out there for us to decipher. If we recognize them as such, the ''OCR machine'' figures it got it right in the first place. If we miss one letter or number, then it must end up somewhere where people involved in the digitizing process have to make the decision.
I think it's neat as the computer needs us to make a decision. Reverse Cyborg as they say in the article in today's New Scientist Magazine. :)
Captcha is the name given to those squiggles.
 
Yup, they are designed to make sure it's a human posting. That's pretty neat about OCR.

People don't seem to know much about them - we get a fair number of tech support calls at Apple regarding people's email not working and it's usually because, if you enter your pw wrong numerous times, sites like Google require a captcha unlock to get your email to work again.
 
Apparently, some spammers are considering turning to the human Internet hive to write the captcha for them. :eek:
 
Did I get it right, what you're trying to say is the people entering the captcha codes are actually doing some sort of "work" for free for the publishers of these old books and newspapers? I mean, instead of hiring someone to verify the characters, they instead send it out to the internet forums and gets it verified?

on to a similar but a bit different topic, have you guys seen a different captcha where you need to arrange a puzzle to complete the whole image? i swear, i went nuts, i tried more than 10 times to arrage the puzzle to complete image without success.
 
Did I get it right, what you're trying to say is the people entering the captcha codes are actually doing some sort of "work" for free for the publishers of these old books and newspapers? I mean, instead of hiring someone to verify the characters, they instead send it out to the internet forums and gets it verified?

on to a similar but a bit different topic, have you guys seen a different captcha where you need to arrange a puzzle to complete the whole image? i swear, i went nuts, i tried more than 10 times to arrage the puzzle to complete image without success.

Yes! But they do hire people only to resolve issues that the Captchas are unable to on the Internet. There are tens of millions of books and newspapers that need to be digitized. Hiring people to do it all would be unrealistic. I don't think they are actually working for the publishers.

As for the puzzles, it's the first time I hear of it. :)
 
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