Fill Out CAPTCHAs, Digitize Books At The Same Time

alphadogg wrote with a link to a Networld article about a noble endeavor: putting CAPTCHAs to work for the good of humanity. A scientist at Carnegie Mellon is looking to create a new type of security check that will assist in a project meant to digitize and make searchable text from books and printed materials. Above and beyond that, the offering would probably be more secure than most current systems. "Instead of requiring visitors to retype random numbers and letters, they would retype text that otherwise is difficult for the optical character recognition systems to decipher when being used to digitize books and other printed materials. The translated text would then go toward the digitization of the printed material on behalf of the Internet Archive project."

Re:Verification?

[bugnuts]

The problem is that any unsophisticated captcha interpreter can spit out the text that's known, and make a (bad) guess at what is hard to read. Then, if there is any significant amount of spammers, we end up with exactly the same issue - computers having trouble with OCR.

e.g., /. puts in a captcha to translate the following two sections:
12345
l1il1

The captcha software knows the "12345"
but it doesn't know the "l1ill1". A human could figure out both.

But spammer captcha deciphering can figure out 12345, and is allowed to incorrectly guess 11ii1 for the 2nd part. End result is

• a spammer is posting something as indecipherable as this message except insults your penis size
• some OCRed book is now committed to a false interpretation
• I have to change the password on my luggage.

Re:I got my digitized copy of the US Constitution

[multipartmixed]

Constitution, consititution...

Oh! You mean the "E. Plebnista?"

This expains

[Joebert]

Please type the characters you see in the following image to register.

George Bush

Type: Miserable Failure

Thankyou, click here to proceed.

Hmmm, That Looks Like A...

[WiseWeasel]

Damnit, where's the smushed bug key?!?