Got CAPTCHA?

Just wrote this interesting article on a new innovative idea of utilizing CAPTCHA for more meaningful purposes, which could be a very good business idea. Do you know that an estimated 150,000 hours are wasted by people like you and I in decoding these CAPTCHAs?

If interested, can read the article here: www.lifesperspective.com

Appreciate your comments!

Tks.

 

At least take the time to properly credit the idea.

http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/05/24/2148217&from=rss

 

Pls don't make accusations without knowing the facts.

There are already a few blog posts on this topic and I'm pretty sure slashdot was not the originator of this information. FYI, I got my source off cnn.com. I have not stolen any ideas except stating the facts and voicing my own opinions. I usually wld give credit, as can be seen in my previous posts, but thought this was not necessary as I was merely using the reported facts to voice an opinion.

 

Hmmm... very dry beginning but funny by the end.

I am not sure if you are actually being in anyway shape or form serious on this? I will take the bait though just in case you are. If the idea is that someone is helping to decifer difficult to read text how does this work as a CAPTCHA as the site cannot check if you have gotten it right or not?

 

Very noble concept but let me count the many flaws ...

1. People whine already about text-picture captcha, how much worse is it going to be when the pages of the book are "aged".

2. Someone has to scan all these pages in so that we can have something to read.

3. If you scan in a page, somehow you have to convert that into 6-8 character chunks

4. If you do this via css (by offsetting the margins) the whole scanned page would have to load killing many terabytes of bandwidth.

5. Programs can do this already ... rendering the captcha absolutely worthless for keeping bots away.

6. If you don't already know what the answer is ... what good is the captcha? Captcha systems rely on the server knowing the correct input, therefore matching it up.

7. How in the world would you organize this across millions of sites? Sessions would not work with an api and if the information is open, would it not be very easy to crack?

I'm sure there is more but that is where I stop. I truly would applaud someone wanting to record all the rare books into text so we can preserve them for generations. Not to mention the fact that people (like me) would never touch a paperback ... but I would have little issues converting a book that interests me into mp3 for my ipod.

 

I spend some time myself to create a captcha system, but finally I found freecap ... I think it's the best free captcha.

 

Think u have some valid points, tks. Wld just like to add or respond to some of them:

1. It may or may not be worse with aged books. Think it depends and for some it may even be better. So it is definitely not a one-size-fits-all problem.

2. Someone is ALREADY scanning all the pages. That's how they use OCR currently.

6. Very good point that I did not think about. This is gonna be a BIG problem isn't it? Well, i guess, we'll just have to wait and see.

If you feel like it, wld appreciate u putting these comments in my blog. Think its insightful and valuable comments for others to think about

 

Nice article, and nice idea. Had to reread twice to understand.

 

Scanners and ocr are a lot better than it used to be. A quality scanner can easily adjust brightness and contrast to commpensate for faded pages.(simple)