ReCaptcha: The smartest way to deal with something annoying

Spam, zombie robots, and the rest of the dark underbelly of the Internet has led to one of the Web's big annoyances: the captcha. That's the barely readable block of random letters you must translate in order to prove your humanness, and it's supposedly the one thing that separates us from the machines. It's also used in nearly every site registration process--and more recently at site logins. The bottom line is that it's annoying but also utterly necessary to keep evil at bay.

Enter reCAPTCHA, a project of the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. A mix between disease-curing Folding@Home, and MyCroft [review], reCAPTCHA requires users to solve two jumbled words: one is the actual captcha, the other is just a word that needs to be translated into text. These words come from various scanned books and documents residing on the Internet Archive. Many of those books were written before computers and in their current state (PDFs and image files) are just glorified photographs--a medium that is still hard to sort through. Once complete, they'll be digital text, and completely searchable.

Words for translation are not just chosen by random. Documents that have been scanned, get checked by an Optical Character Recognition (OCR) engine, which is able to pick up many of the words. Those that are misspelled by OCR, or are impossible to read, are plucked and put into the ReCaptcha word pool. Sites can implement ReCaptcha several ways. There are plug-ins for WordPress, MediaWiki, phpBB, and PHP.

I've embedded a sample ReCaptcha below. You'll notice both words look similar, as ReCaptcha is using both words from the same source, so you can't tell which one has already been solved.

Related: inChorus [review]

[found on del.icio.us]

[hadaso]

They're not first!

spammers have already been using human efforts to get past captcha "barriers" to accomplish other useful results for them: namely to allow them to get past these "barriers and gain access to other systems they can abuse. They display the captcha they need to get past to their own users dying to see the young female human they're watching covered by less clithes and feed back the result to whereever the captcha image was displyed in the first place, thereby gaining access to useful resources such as multiple email accounts that can be used to send millions of junk emails to people who are not going to bother reading them (but still have to "just hit delete" a billion times).

[TMB333]

Hopefully, there's multiple cross checking!

I tried a few of the sample reCaptchas, and after a few tries just ended up trying to guess the word that was the correct Captcha, and 'maliciously' putting in some false word for the other. Normally, I'm a 'law abiding' citizen that tries to do good where I can, however, just like anyone else, occasionally I'll just want to let loose and may end up being bad just for the sake of being bad.

Understandably that this is a good idea to help digitize old archives, but I'm assuming (or hoping) these developers of reCaptcha have taken into account that others out there may also be mischievous at times and maliciously type in incorrect words purposely. If they haven't already thought of it, then they should be taking at least a good multiple of 'like' answers from different users for each word, before they accept the translation as truth.