Normal CAPTCHAs just protect you from Spam, and already some of the easier ones can be read by Bots or are breakable without even using OCR technology, so they aren’t protect you any more. Daily, Internet user solve 60 million CAPTCHAs which sum up to a total time consume of 150 thousand hours a day.
And as a current trend within the Internet to share work to get it done faster, it just was a question of time when someone invents a CAPTCHA which not only protects you from Spam, it also uses this time useful.

ReCAPTCHA

ReCAPTCHA is just like other CAPTCHAs you have to insert words(or just signs), to get to the next step or be able to post your comment, photo or what else. But it get it’s words from archive.org, a website where they digitalize round about 12.000 books each month, to have these books not only as picture(which needs much more Space) they let it automatically read through an OCR software. Which automatically reads the text and saves it as some textfile. But as they’re scanning books which are hand written or not in good condition the OCR can’t read every word correctly. And these not readable words are then used for the service.

It’s a Service

Yeah it’s no software package you need to install, you simply create an account at their website, get some API Key and embed their CAPTCHA tool to your Comment form or where you want to use it for. For WordPress, MediaWiki and phpBB are already Plugins available which just needs to be installed. Also a PHP environment is already available, so you will have not much work to get started. As this is a Service which just embeds some iframe and Javascript and the CAPTCHA picture to your website no additional work needs to be done, to keep it up to date.

How it works

After you added a few lines of code your website has then the CAPTCHA on it and it correct installed it will allow some actions only if the CAPTCHA is answered correctly. The CAPTCHA you get displayed contains two words the first word is already known and is only used to prove that you’re human. The second one couldn’t be read by the OCR software and is now submitted to ReCAPTCHA users to find out what word it is. It’s so often used up to the date enough People suggested the same word that it’s mostly this suggested word. The internet archive gets this word now back and can add it to the text. Also this word is now added to the list of primary words to prove that a human do solve the CAPTCHA.

Is it a pro or a neg

A normal CAPTCHA takes about 10 seconds for a human to solve, which normally displays something around 4-8 signs. So this does now display depending on the words, but for sure 2 words, 6-20 or more signs. So this will need more time, but that hasn’t to be the case, at least not proportional, as words can be easier recognized than just some collection of letters and numbers. But for sure these 150 thousand hours each day aren’t spend useful as they’re still only used identify if the visitor is human or artificial. But the additional time you have to spend on it is used useful. But is it worth this additional time?
Mostly the User will tell if they’re willed to spend more time on CAPTCHAs, to support this project or not.

As well Webmaster will decide if they think it’s worth supporting this project by adding their CAPTCHA to their Website. But as most don’t care about what runs on their page as long as it’s doing it’s job well. Not to talk about users who don’t even have something similar in usage. There will be maybe just a small market for the Project.

And when I just talk about the protection of the website, I can resume with the lack of diversity I see currently within ReCAPTCHA, as it seems it just uses one Font, as well as always the same way of a line through, Fontcolor and static non gradient Color background. I know it’s hard to use another font for the unknown word…but they could at least add more differences to the first word as well as to the Background. But as it just runs as service there’s no big problem to make changes to the CAPTCHA and every user receives them. This lack seems currently to be minor as the CAPTCHA uses JavaScript, which most Spam bots will not support therefore they don’t even notice that there’s a CAPTCHA. And as long as it have no big spreading it will surely be uninteresting to Spammers to invest time into cracking this CAPTCHA just to send 10 Spam Comments a day more.

Conclusion

It’s a good idea to use the time spend for solving CAPTCHAs to help read books, but is it good to add additional time to do so? It seems so or how else should you be able to tell whether the input was human or bot made? We’ll have to see how much it will spread and how the visitors will like it. I’m supporting this idea although I’m not adding it to my website as I’m running some other projects to kick asses of spammers.

This entry was posted on Sunday, May 27th, 2007 at 9:53 am and is filed under Homepage, Others, Webmaster, Wordpress. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.