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Comment by Albuca | Hacker News Reader

I can see where they are coming from in wanting to verify that a user is Human, and getting them to play a game is a great idea.

However, that solution does not work for everyone. There are those who use smartphones, tablets, or are stuck behind corperate networks that (cannot/will not) allow you to even view or interact with the game.

I love the idea of not having to type in captcha's all the time, but the solution will have to be a universal one; making it easier for the user to verify they are human, while still keeping all the bots out.

In the meantime, at least recaptcha is doing something useful with the time we spend figuring out the captcha's.

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"In the meantime, at least recaptcha is doing something useful with the time we spend figuring out the captcha's."

Can you elaborate? What do you mean they are doing something useful? I'm not familiar with how recaptcha works but, I have used it on many sites before.

(Thanks!)

"reCAPTCHA improves the process of digitizing books by sending words that cannot be read by computers to the Web in the form of CAPTCHAs for humans to decipher. More specifically, each word that cannot be read correctly by OCR is placed on an image and used as a CAPTCHA. This is possible because most OCR programs alert you when a word cannot be read correctly."

More at http://www.google.com/recaptcha/learnmore

corin_ hit the hammer on the head with that.

Sory, I should have tossed a link in when I made that comment.

There are always two words that you will see. One that is known, and the other is unknown.

Once enough users (lets use 10 for this example) type the same responce to the unknown word (and correctly identify the known word), the unknown word will move to a known status and be matched up with a new unknown word.

Thereby digitizing books! (ever wondered why one of the words is clearer than the other? Now you know!)

Are they actually still doing that? For the last year or so, recaptcha seems to only serve up nonsense words.

Only one of the words is actually known and used to verify humanness. The other is an unknown scan from a book, and after a certain number of identical entries (3?) is considered known.

That reliance on "certain number of identical entries" was used by 4Chan's gaming of the Time 100 poll in 2009. The so-called "penis attack": http://musicmachinery.com/2009/04/27/moot-wins-time-inc-lose...

And I think of that every time someone mentions ReCAPTCHA

I just tested it on a mobile device and it actually worked great. I was surprised.

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