reCAPTCHA Hard At Work, Rescuing Fading Texts 112
sciencehabit writes "Computer scientists have developed a program, called reCAPTCHA, which is being used in lieu of CAPTCHA by several sites, to help digitize old books and newspapers. The reCAPTCHA takes entries from old and faded texts that optical scanners and digital-text readers have trouble with. So every time you solve that string of crooked letters, you may actually be helping historians digitally reconstruct a page from the 1908 New York Times." The Science Now story links to the longer and more informative article at Ars Technica. (We last mentioned this program last year — and now it's good to get some sense of how well it's working.)
Validate your data, guys! (Score:3, Funny)
I can usually tell which of the two words is from a real old text. With high probability (>90%) I can correctly answer the real CAPTCHA and replace someone's OCR'd word with "penis".
I've only ever done this maybe ten or twenty times, but it could easily become an automatic part of using the system.
Huh? 1908 New York Times? (Score:3, Funny)
The New York Times is already online from 1851 onwards. the concept is cool, truly, but why not CAPTCHA something not already accomplished? Oh, I know. That was, like, a metaphor, right?
DMCA Violation (Score:5, Funny)
Prior art (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Not new (Score:3, Funny)
Facebook uses reCAPTCHA. I guess you can make something useful out of the millions of useless teenagers wasting their time on Facebook.
Re:Not new (Score:5, Funny)
Facebook uses reCAPTCHA. I guess you can make something useful out of the millions of useless teenagers wasting their time on Facebook.
That's not fair.
Plenty of useless adults waste their time on Facebook.
Re:Cool possible uses (Score:5, Funny)
Or perhaps SLASHDOT-READER:
OVERWEIGHT
GEEK
SPENDS-TO-MUCH-TIME-USING-COMPUTERS
ALL-OF-THE-ABOVE
I fit into the category ALL-OF-THE-ABOVE. The only generalisation that is missing about slashdotters is the one about girlfriends.
Re:Prior art (Score:3, Funny)
Re:One Problem (Score:3, Funny)
The following security test allows us to validate you are a human and not an automated script.
please type the following two words in the text box below
you moron
____________ _____________
Finally logged in (Score:2, Funny)
Took me a bit to get past the new security measures, But I got a coupon 5 cents off my next shoe purchase.
Re:AC for the plain old CAPTCHA (Score:5, Funny)
Re:One Problem (Score:5, Funny)
One FUNDAMENTAL problem with this
... is that you didn't RTFA.
Re:Validate your data, guys! (Score:2, Funny)
I can see future generations sitting down for a good read:
MOBY COCK
Chapturd One
Call me LOLOLFAG...
Re:Image Captchas (Score:5, Funny)
Just use an alt tag.
Re:Not new (Score:4, Funny)
But you...
*sigh* ...Nevermind. It's Friday. Go have a beer or something.