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Anonymous Posting Returns, I Hope | 35 comments (35 topical) | Post A Comment
ReCAPTCHA[ Parent | Reply to This ] (none / 0) (#18)
by AnonymousUser on Fri May 25, 2007 at 09:25:12 AM PDT

Ed,

I came across the following article in TG Daily:

http://www.tgdaily.com/content/view/32194/118/

Carnegie-Mellon students are using OCR-unrecognizable words found during their Internet book scanning initiative as CAPTCHA phrases used by websites.

I propose that you switch over to this new and decided more useful method of verifying anonymous users.

Bob

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Unverifiable[ Parent | Reply to This ] (none / 0) (#20)
by Anonymous User on Sat May 26, 2007 at 09:17:25 AM PDT

These "captchas" can't be machine-verified though, can they? So a spammer could have their bot submit any old response, and they'd be able to spam, and at the same time they'd pollute the results of the text scanning with nonsense.

Unless the captcha submission is vetted by a human, but then it kind of defeats the whole idea. That human could just directly aid the scanning project instead, and it would take ages between submitting your posting with the captcha and the posting being accepted, during which time you need to keep a copy in case something goes wrong and you need to retry, or risk losing data.

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Answer from recaptcha.net[ Parent | Reply to This ] (none / 0) (#22)
by AnonymousUser on Thu May 31, 2007 at 11:13:18 AM PDT

But if a computer can't read such a CAPTCHA, how does the system know the correct answer to the puzzle? Here's how: 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.

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Anonymous Posting Returns, I Hope | 35 comments (35 topical) | Post A Comment
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