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:Better links

[inKubus]

Also, Amazon has a pretty cool program [mturk.com] where you can perform HITs (Human Intelligence Tasks) for a few cents each. They have a lot of stuff like transcribing podcasts, identifying stuff in satellite images, etc.

Re:Verification?

[Mr. Underbridge]

This is one of the most creative ideas I've heard all year. Human-based distributed computing with captchas? Awesome!

Great CAPTCHA solution to solve people not RTFA!

[GNUALMAFUERTE]

Come on people, start using your brains please!, just a little!, half the posters have been asking the same 2 stupid questions, or even worse, posting the same 2 stupid questions with question mark removed, as if they were facts.

We should put a CAPTCHA system on slashdot:

When you want to post, You get to type-in a CAPTCHA. The Image for this is generated in this way:

  - The links to the article/s actually link to a page with a javascript wrapper that loads the article text, but replaces certain words with the graphical representation of that word, in the form of a CAPTCHA.
  - This words form a phrase that the user must type in if he wants to post. There are different combinations of phrases selected from the article, and each poster gets one randomly.

This technology should be called CAPSSAA (for Completely Automated Public Stupidity test to tell Slashdoters and Assholes Apart)

Re:Official reCAPTCHA site

[MindStalker]

Problem is, for the first few people seeing a new Capatcha the computer will have to let you through even if you guess wrong, so the lock feature of the Capatcha doesn't work.

As others mentioned this system gives you a known then an unknown, though I think its stupid that it further makes it difficult by putting a slash through it and making it wavey. Helloo, if you system had a hard time recognizing it why do you want to make it harder to recognize. I saw several in the examples in which the word was nonenglish and I had a hard time guessing the correct spelling because I couldn't make out a letter. There needs to be a I don't know button as well :)

Image spam

[JeremyR]

Maybe this technique can be adapted to fight image spam more effectively :-)