Search / 37 posts tagged reCAPTCHA

Some of you may have noticed that I added WP-reCAPTCHA to this blog.  Yeah, it’s annoying to make out some of those words.  I hate it too.  So why did I add it? Simple.  I was just using Akismet before, and while that does an excellent job of keeping the spam out, I was still getting over 200 spams

Luis von Ahn, one of the creators of CAPTCHA, has been getting some good press lately on his reCAPTCHA service. But all this good ink usually fails to mention the inherent weaknesses of the scheme, while extolling the benefits (which von Ahn and Carnegie Mellon University seem to be making a quick buck off of).

Couple of quick items: I’ve been getting a lot of comment spam attempts lately, but I’ve been too lazy to do anything about it.  Then the reCAPTCHA thing hit the news and I thought that was pretty perfect for a book history blog.  So, my apologies for taking up your time with the typing of blurry

reCAPTCHA: Workforce of Accuracy Posted by Philip Davis under Experimentation, Research, Technology, Tools | Tags: digitization, OCR, Optical character recognition, ReCAPTCHA, spam detection |

Posting emails addresses on public forums and webpages is a sure shot way to get your email address picked by Spam Bots and get listed on spam lists, the most common hack used to prevent SPAM BOTS is to post email address in malformed state for example xyz@abc.com can be posted as xyz [AT] abc.com

To some, a web site like Craigslist asking you to verify that you are indeed a human by retyping distorted, nonsensical words is irritating. But the next time you do it, you could be helping to fill in some historical blanks.

When is a CAPTCHA not annoying? When it is used to help digitize old public domain texts. CAPTCHAs (an overly-cutesy acronym standing for “Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart”) are those tests that are supposed to verify you are a real human by making you type some distorted letters or numbers.

REALLY fascinating story in today’s Wall Street Journal about inventor Luis von Ahn and the use of his Captcha — “Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart” to help get old books and newspapers online faster and cheaper.

I’m sorry that the last part of the series has taken so long but I have loads of other stuff to do these days (like finishing Braid before Mats did and finish up the ReCaptcha stuff for Zend Framework 1.6) but I have started writing some custom Sniffs and when I feel I have enough I will write the last post.

ReCaptcha, a play on the antispam tests known as Captchas (Completely Automated Public Turing Test To Tell Computers and Humans Apart), a test that people can pass, but machines cannot. People typically fill out Captchas so Web sites can verify that a human, rather than a spam bot, is behind the request for a new e-mail address, log-in, or membership.