Archive for the ‘Technology’ Category:
reCAPTCHA
In one of my previous posts, I highlighted the use of images compared to traditional text as a better way to protect your e-mail address from Spammers.
reCAPTCHA brings this to another higher level. Instead of directly revealing the image file containing the user’s e-mail address, reCAPTCHA requires a person to successfully type two words in oder to obtain the requested e-mail address.
The image displayed below is one of the ways many websites use to authenticate that a person instead of a bot is completing a transaction through the internet.
reCAPTCHA, however, requires a user to type two instead of a single word for verification.
Why two words?
Besides providing its users the ability to hide their e-mail addresses from spammers, the image verification process is actually utilizing the brain power of millions in digitalizing books. A normal reCAPTCHA process goes like this:
A user is asked to type the two words. One of the words has already been solved by reCAPTCHA and reCAPTCHA has the solution to it. However, the other word has not been solved and this is where the user’s comes into play. By utilizing this method, this project aims to solve the imperfection of Optical Character Recognition tools that do not translate handwritten text to computer characters well enough.
The CAPTCHA Project
The CAPTCHA project is a project of the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon. The project claims that over 60 million puzzles are solved daily using the brain power of people like you and me.
I believe it is only time that seperates us from digitalizing all the books available now. Preserving books in the digital form is more cost effective in the long run and most importantly, they will be accessible by our future generation.
Here is a CAPTCHA that helps me protect my e-mail address.
tian…@gmail.com