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Google Using ReCAPTCHA To Decode Street Addresses
smolloy writes "Apparently some users of reCAPTCHA have recently begun seeing photographs appear in their CAPTCHA puzzles — photos that look very much like zoomed in house numbers taken from Google Streetview. It appears that Google has decided to put the reCAPTCHA system to help clean up Google streetview images, and 'according to a Google spokesperson, the system isn't limited to street addresses, but also involves street names and even traffic signs.' A large collection of these has appeared on the Blackhatworld website."
Awesome. More invasion of privacy. Fuck Google.
bonch
This is an incredibly fascinating and great use of the technology.
Wow that site is so terrible looking that it makes Geocities and myspace look decent. The only thing it's missing is cosmic cursors.
What happens to the other part? Does google keep recycling it until it has multiples of the same answer? Can we all agree on a word for the addresses just to have some fun with google?
They're using us to identify our own home and business addresses, does anyone else feel a little violated by this?
Could just be me being paranoid, but this sounds like something out of a science fiction book. Whoever had the idea to do this, I have to admit, was really using their head though.
If carrots got you drunk, rabbits would be fucked up. - Comedian Mitch Hedberg R.I.P. 03/30/68-2/24/05
And put your house number in Roman Numerals. Nothing like living in number CLXXIV to screw up the recaptcha. Anyone answering with 174 is likely counted as wrong...
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
Do they allow the early set of people to type whatever they want, then pass the next set of people on if they type something that matches, let's say, the top five words typed by the first set of people, then assume after 1000 people or whatever that the most frequently entered word properly represents what's in the image?
âoeRFID in School Shirts must be trial runâ
The trial runs began a LONG time ago!
Weâ(TM)re way past that process.
Now weâ(TM)re in the portion of the game where they will try and BRAINWASH us into accepting these things because not everyone BROADCASTS themselves on and offline, so RFID tracking will NEED to be EVERYWHERE, eventually.
RFID is employed in MANY areas of society. RFID is used to TRACK their livestock (humans) in:
* 1. A lot of BANKâ(TM)s ATM & DEBIT cards (easily cloned and tracked)
* 2. Subway, rail, bus, other mass transit passes (all of your daily
activities, where you go, are being recorded in many ways)
* 3. A lot of RETAIL storesâ(TM) goods
* 4. Corporate slaves (in badges, tags, etc)
and many more ways!
Search the web about RFID and look at the pictures of various RFID devices, theyâ(TM)re not all the same in form or function! When you see how tiny some of them are, youâ(TM)ll be amazed! Search for GPS tracking and devices, too along with the more obscured:
- FM Fingerprinting &
- Writeprint
tracking methods! Letâ(TM)s not forget the LIQUIDS at their disposal which can be sprayed on you and/or your devices/clothing and TRACKED, similar to STASI methods of tracking their livestock (humans).
Visit David Ickeâ(TM)s and Prison Planetâ(TM)s discussion forums and VCâ(TM)s discussion forums and READ the threads about RFID and electronic tagging, PARTICIPATE in discussions. SHARE what you know with others!
These TRACKING technologies, on and off the net are being THROWN at us by the MEDIA, just as cigarettes and alcohol have and continue to be, though the former less than they used to. The effort to get you to join FACEBOOK and TWITTER, for example, is EVERYWHERE.
Maybe, you think, youâ(TM)ll join FACEBOOK or TWITTER with an innocent reason, in part perhaps because your family, friends, business parters, college ties want or need you. Then itâ(TM)ll start with one photo of yourself or you in a group, then another, then another, and pretty soon you are telling STRANGERS as far away as NIGERIA with scammers reading and archiving your PERSONAL LIFE and many of these CRIMINALS have the MEANS and MOTIVES to use it how they please.
One family was astonished to discover a photo of theirs was being used in an ADVERTISEMENT (on one of those BILLBOARDS you pass by on the road) in ANOTHER COUNTRY! There are other stories. Iâ(TM)ve witnessed people posting their photo in social networking sites, only to have others who dis/like them COPY the photo and use it for THEIR photo! Itâ(TM)s a complete mess.
The whole GAME stretches much farther than the simple RFID device(s), but how far are you willing to READ about these types of instrusive technologies? If youâ(TM)ve heard, Wikileaks exposed corporations selling SPYWARE in software and hardware form to GOVERNMENTS!
You have to wonder, âoeWill my anti-malware program actually DISCOVER government controlled malware? Or has it been WHITELISTED? or obscured to the point where it cannot be detected? Does it carve a nest for itself in your hardware devicesâ(TM) FIRMWARE, what about your BIOS?
Has your graphics card been poisoned, too?â No anti virus programs scan your FIRMWARE on your devices, especially not your ROUTERS which often contain commercially rubber stamped approval of BACKDOORS for certain organizations which hackers may be exploiting right now! Search on the web for CISCO routers and BACKDOORS. That is one of many examples.
Some struggle for privacy, some argue about it, some take preventitive measures, but those who are wise know:
Privacy is DEAD. Youâ(TM)ve just never seen the tombstone.
I have read the quote from Google about what they are doing several times, and I don't see what everyone else sees. It appears to me that they are using the already known street names and numbers as possible ReCAPTCHA images. What they are NOT doing is using the results given by people to define what the image says. The point of the experiment is to determine whether these images are sufficient to separate people from web-bots. I imagine that they will look at the number of 'wrong' answers from both sides of the test, and see if bots are able to parse the street view images significantly more often than the standard test images.
So... can anyone point to something in the Google quote to show me where I went wrong? From TFA, here is the quote:
We’re currently running an experiment in which characters from Street View images are appearing in CAPTCHAs. We often extract data such as street names and traffic signs from Street View imagery to improve Google Maps with useful information like business addresses and locations. Based on the data and results of these reCaptcha tests, we’ll determine if using imagery might also be an effective way to further refine our tools for fighting machine and bot-related abuse online.
I don't see how anyone can be pissy they're doing this.
They already list the number of the house on maps.
My internetting is no good.
What they are NOT doing is using the results given by people to define what the image says.
Um, no, that's exactly what ReCaptcha is for! The standard ReCaptcha images are all from old books that were scanned in (and presumably had trouble being OCRed with high confidence), and Google used ReCaptcha to "read" the words.
For heaven's sake, ReCaptcha's MOTTO is: "reCAPTCHA: Stop Spam, Read Books"
I read how it works. Multiple users are shown the same image, and once a few people have identified a given image as the same word, it's treated as the "correct" answer, and then later users have to match that answer to get past the ReCaptcha. This is why they show you more than one word....one word has a "known" answer, the other word is one they're still trying to figure out the "right" answer to.
With the first link, the chain is forged.
I'm glad something is being done I can't recall how many times I've looked up a street address to find Google maps reporting it as being 4 or 5 blocks away (on average) from where it actually is.
Thank you for the information, I've often wondered about them.
I only have about a 60% success rate on those swirly semi-inverted ones. My wife's friend's decaptcha software does a much better job than I do with its 79% success rate. I had wondered that as they get harder to read that the day was almost here when only machines would have the ability to decode captchas and prove that they were human.
I said - don't look Ethel!..., but it was too late..., she'd already looked.
I do not like green eggs and FUCK
I do not like FUCK Sam I am
It's beyond me why the fuck you dumb foss-fags linked to a random Ad Words page where you can't even submit the captcha without filling in the form above it.
http://www.google.com/recaptcha/learnmore
There you can acutally enter them in until you get bored. Refreshed it about 20 times and got 3 with building numbers.
It's quite noticeable if you use a site which relies heavily on recaptchas. For example, when you get a word which has old english S which looks like a modern small case F, you're much better off claiming it's an F instead of giving the correct answer.
/b/ has standardized on "nigger" for anything unreadable.
Back when reCaptcha showed two words that you could find in the dictionary, black on white I had no problem with it, it seemed like a good idea and you might be contributing to digitizing a book or something.
But now you just get randomly generated characters with a zigzag going through the middle and blobs that invert it and it's hard to tell if this one letter is an 'i' or an 'r' or a 't'.
So I don't even bother looking at the real word and just solve the generated one.
So many addresses has been fuzzy that I could that could only be a strange design choice.
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
I thought text in Streetview was blurred out by design in the same way that faces were-- automatically and for security reasons (read: so Google doesn't get sued by crazy OMG I'M ON TEH INTERNET people).
I'd actually prefer if they un-blurred all street numbers and signs. It's fine to rely on Map's street number location when you're in a huge city, and the difference between 123 fake street and 125 fake street is ten feet or so. But last time I planned a road trip, the difference between 123 Country Side Road and 200 Country Side Road could be dozens of kilometers or more. Often I'll get a recommendation to visit Out Of The Way Restaurant that has the red sign, just keep an eye out for it. I'll go into Street View, "drive" along my intended route looking for that sign-- and pass by dozens of little buildings with red signs that read "{&o /// &&6$#q blurrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrry".
UTF-8: There and Back Again