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reCAPTCHA Hard At Work, Rescuing Fading Texts

Posted by timothy on from the strange-confluence dept.

sciencehabit writes "Computer scientists have developed a program, called reCAPTCHA, which is being used in lieu of CAPTCHA by several sites, to help digitize old books and newspapers. The reCAPTCHA takes entries from old and faded texts that optical scanners and digital-text readers have trouble with. So every time you solve that string of crooked letters, you may actually be helping historians digitally reconstruct a page from the 1908 New York Times." The Science Now story links to the longer and more informative article at Ars Technica. (We last mentioned this program last year — and now it's good to get some sense of how well it's working.)

7 of 112 comments (clear)

  1. Not new by JazzyMusicMan · · Score: 4, Informative

    Ticketmaster and other sites have already been doing this for a while. Go to ticketmaster and search for tickets, you'll see two words. One is known and the other is unknown. If you don't believe me, try to guess which one they know and misspell the other one on purpose (or don't, this is for historic posterity =) )

    1. Re:Not new by erbmjw · · Score: 3, Informative
      from reCAPTCHA FAQ

      When showing reCAPTCHA to the user, is it possible not to show the reCAPTCHA logo? We allow you to customize the theme of reCAPTCHA with our Client API. You are still required to have text on your website which states that you are using reCAPTCHA, however with our theming API, you are free to do this in a way that blends in to your site.

    2. Re:Not new by Your+Pal+Dave · · Score: 3, Informative

      Quoting from the NPR story which aired earlier today:

      more than 40,000 Web sites -- including popular ones such as Ticketmaster, Facebook and Craigslist -- are using a new kind of security program called reCAPTCHA.

  2. Image Captchas by pembo13 · · Score: 3, Informative

    I've found implementing a simple "please choose the name of the item seen bellow" eliminates a large amount of spam (all?) but has the problem of not being viable for blind people.

    --
    "Thanks for all the money you paid to us. We've used it to buy off ISO among other things" -Microsoft
  3. Re:reCAPTCHA and Open Source by corbettw · · Score: 3, Informative

    There are multiple libraries for reCAPTCHA already published, all under the MIT License. Just see http://code.google.com/p/recaptcha/ for a list of them.

    --
    God invented whiskey so the Irish would not rule the world.
  4. Re:Problems With ReCaptcha by Robotech_Master · · Score: 3, Informative

    I've seen one ReCAPTCHA string that was just a distorted entirely illegible blob of ink.

    Just do what I did: click the "refresh" button to the right for a new word pair and enter that one.

    --
    Editor Emeritus and Senior Writer, TeleRead.org
  5. Use to hide your own email addy by RJFerret · · Score: 5, Informative

    You can also use reCaptcha for your own email address, and be more willing to provide it "publicly" since they'd have to answer the reCaptcha to get to the mailto... reCaptcha mailhide