Comments on: CAPTCHA's Can Be Useful, Don'tcha Know

By: ivanrlynn

ivanrlynn — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 17:12:35 +0000

This ins not very useful but – Don’tcha Know – come on? only poking love the gigaom blog guys!

By: Carnegie Mellon’s ReCAPTCHA Enhanced Audio New Functionality

Carnegie Mellon’s ReCAPTCHA Enhanced Audio New Functionality — Tue, 09 Dec 2008 14:07:23 +0000

[...] CAPTCHA’s Can Be Useful, Don’tcha Know Sphere: Related Content [...]

By: DG Lewis

DG Lewis — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 13:59:14 +0000

Actually, for those of us who attended there before 1986, there will always be a hyphen in Carnegie-Mellon University.

Of course, we also call the Tepper School of Business “GSIA” and the Heinz School of Public Policy and Management “SUPA”.

I’m dating myself, aren’t I?

By: Alan

Alan — Sat, 16 Aug 2008 23:50:34 +0000

reCaptcha is a fabulous example of what we call collective intelligence in the NMC Horizon report
http://wp.nmc.org/horizon2008/chapters/collective-intelligence/

I use it on several registrations sites, and the MediaWiki code has cut my wiki spam from alot down to nil.

By: Doing Good Via Spam Protection: The Art of Leverage | Life Beyond Code

Doing Good Via Spam Protection: The Art of Leverage | Life Beyond Code — Sat, 16 Aug 2008 14:38:01 +0000

[...] You can read the whole story here: CAPTCHA’s Can Be useful, Don’tcha Know [...]

By: Economical Value of Reading - Porn,SPAM,OCR and Mechnical Turks « Evil Fish

Economical Value of Reading - Porn,SPAM,OCR and Mechnical Turks « Evil Fish — Sat, 16 Aug 2008 06:47:59 +0000

[...] Value of Reading – Porn,SPAM,OCR and Mechnical Turks Gigaom has a nice write-up on using Captcha for improving OCR [...]

By: Nitin Borwankar

Nitin Borwankar — Sat, 16 Aug 2008 02:27:47 +0000

@Ranjit only the first of the two words is a security word – the second word is not a security word – there is no predefined definitive answer there – just the one that most people think is the right interpretation – this has some problems IMO – the OCR could be garbled enough that a majority of the people interpret it as something other than what it is meant to be.

By: Ranjit Padmanabhan

Ranjit Padmanabhan — Sat, 16 Aug 2008 00:55:02 +0000

This is a wee bit curious.

When you “decode” and submit a captcha, it is compared against an authoritative string to determine if the data was properly entered.

If this is an illegible captcha, how is that authoritative string generated in the first place? Are there a set of admissible values? Doesn’t that reduce the security value of the captcha?

By: Chris Albrecht

Chris Albrecht — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 23:55:09 +0000

@Curtis,

D’oh! Thanks for the heads up. It’s been fixed.

Chris-Albrecht

By: Faramarz

Faramarz — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 22:18:35 +0000

Very Nice!

I have a no-brainer solution to the misspelling. they’ve probably thought of it already. but why don’t they take all the user inputs for a single term/image scan and batch them up. then based on the percentage of duplicates, they can determine what greater number of people see and type, and thus higher accuracy in what actually is displayed to them.

hope that makes sense

By: Curtis

Curtis — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 21:48:24 +0000

Hi Chris,

Nice article, especially given the little known facts behind CAPTCHA. I must, however, as an alum of Carnegie Mellon point out that there is no “-” in the spelling.

Great article, so you’re forgiven for the incorrect spelling. :-)