Newegg, CAPTCHA, browsers = reCAPTCHA
by Toxicboy on Mar.25, 2008, under cool ideas
Something curious I noticed today. Login to Newegg using Firefox and you are forced to use a CAPTCHA, use IE and its not there. I’m going with IE here because I couldnt figure out if it was showing me a “Z” or and “N” and neither would work!
Now while I am generally a fan of CAPTCHA, I am an even bigger fan of using the computer for good; enter reCAPTCHA. Essentially, a Carnegie Mellon team led by Luis von Ahn noticed that during the process of digitizing books there are words during scanning process which cannot be converted by OCR software to text. “Each word that cannot be read correctly by OCR is placed on an image and used as a CAPTCHA.”
Here’s how it works:
“Each new word that cannot be read correctly by OCR is given to a user in conjunction with another word for which the answer is already known. The user is then asked to read both words. If they solve the one for which the answer is known, the system assumes their answer is correct for the new one. The system then gives the new image to a number of other people to determine, with higher confidence, whether the original answer was correct.”
By reCAPTCHA’s estimates about 60 million CAPTCHAs are solved by humans every day, equating to more than 150,000 hours of work each day worldwide. Thats a lot of potentially useful computing power for the general good by taking the effort spent solving CAPTCHAs online into “reading” books.
4 Comments for this entry
Leave a Reply
-
Welcome to HR Geeks!
We're a group of (mostly) Hampton Roads based technology enthuisiasts. Our members take part of many different groups, from 757 Labs to TWUUG to sitting at home watching TV.
Our goal with HRGeeks.com is to be a sort of 'clearing house' of all technology related goings-on in Hampton Roads, as well as a home for collaboration and discussion between area geeks.
Check out our our Friends for a full listing of available technology groups in Hampton Roads.
-
Email / iCal Subscriptions
Stay updated on meetings and activities via email or iCal!
March 26th, 2008 on 9:46 am
I had looked at using reCAPTCHA for a web project I’m working on, but it’s hard to be comfortable outsourcing such a critical piece of the puzzle to a third party (non-profit at that!). It’d be neat if you could download a bulk ‘work piece’ of the words, like SETI@Home or the protein folding stuff, so that your web servers had a decent chunk of authentication capability should the reCAPTCHA service go offline for whatever reason.
March 26th, 2008 on 12:01 pm
Hi Adam,
I’m one of the engineers on the reCAPTCHA team. I want to assure you that reCAPTCHA is a serious project and that we realize our users are trusting us with a critical piece of their website.
One of the first things we realized (long before the project launched) is that “this needs to be reliable”. Therefore, from the start we’ve designed a redundant, distributed system. We host our service in multiple datacenters so that the failure of a single ISP will not affect us. We have redundant monitoring that pages the team if there ever was an issue. Finally, our software is designed to handle various types of failure without human intervention.
reCAPTCHA is currently used by a number of large sites including Facebook, Ticketmaster, Bebo, and Imeem. We’ve earned the trust of these users by providing enterprise class uptime.
March 26th, 2008 on 12:14 pm
Ben,
I knew the service was being used by a number of big names – I didn’t realize they were using ‘the standard’ service, I figured they would have done something like I suggested in my previous post.
I do think the project is pretty cool, and a very ingenious way to accomplish it’s goals. It’s nice to see that there is a decent engineering effort behind it as well – is this detailed anywhere? I wasn’t able to find anything about it the last time I looked – just a description of how to use the site.
Thanks for the response!
June 24th, 2009 on 12:53 am
Hello Adam and others,
It is important to understand that CAPTCHA, when no accessible alternatives are provided, inherently discriminates against blind and visually impaired people based on their physical inability to see. Instead of testing for the presence of a human, inaccessible CAPTCHAs test only for a sighted human, serving to dehumanize, insult and lock out blind people.
With the existence of services like reCAPTCHA, there’s absolutely no excuse for there to be any completely inaccessible CAPTCHA on any web site anywhere on the net. If you use another solution or roll your own, you had better be sure it is accessible. If you can’t or won’t do that, then go with reCAPTCHA. I can promise that we in the connected online blind community will not continue to stand for the lockouts caused by inaccessible CAPTCHA. Continuing this practice will surely expose web sites, and the companies with which they are associated, to suffer bad public relations, lawsuits and other similarly nasty surprises.
It is long past time for everyone to get with the program when it comes to equal accessibility!
Regards,
Darrell Shandrow
Accessibility Evangelist
BlindAccessJournal.com