Tip Of The Week
CAPTCHAs
July 6, 2008
Have you ever been on a secure web site and suddenly been asked to identify "warped" letters in order to proceed with, say, registering for something or logging in to something? Well, if you weren't aware, those little "pictures" of words are called "CAPTCHAs" and about 60 million of them are solved on the internet worldwide every day (ensuring that real humans, rather than automatic "bots" are performing the functions they CAPTCHAs protect).
Well, the cool thing is this program called "reCAPTCHA" -- a project of the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. They provide free CAPTCHAs to websites, and in exchange the results from these CAPTCHAs are helping them to properly digitize old books. Essentially, they take images of book pages and have computers that try to recognize the text (using OCR - optical character recognition, as many of you are familiar with) to translate them into a digital format. But, of course, OCR isn't perfect and frequently can't recognize all characters properly, especially from older books with older fonts and such. So, when the computers can't figure out words, they are transformed into CAPTCHAs that provide security to a website, but also help correct words that OCR can't recognize well! It's an incredible process, and I'm probably not explaining it well. More information on it can be found at: HYPERLINK "http://recaptcha.net" \o "http://recaptcha.net/" http://recaptcha.net
Aside from the "coolness" factor, I wanted to let you know about this as a way of providing security on your website for FREE and help out in translating old books to digital format at the same time. Consider utilizing this for your "private" areas of your websites, but especially consider using this to protect email addresses posted to your site. They have a cool implementation of CAPTCHAs with email -- which they call reCAPTCHA Mailhide -- that prevents bots and crawlers from obtaining your email for spam purposes. Wish we had this years ago! Anyway, very cool thing to consider. More info at: HYPERLINK "http://mailhide.recaptcha.net" \o "http://mailhide.recaptcha.net/" http://mailhide.recaptcha.net
Karen Clay
Dominican Cluster Communications Director
Columbus, Ohio
Past Tips:
Yahoo! Group. 25 June 2010. READ MORE >
Facebook URLs. 17 March 2010. READ MORE >
Photo at Your Fingertips. 10 November 2009. READ MORE >
View all previous tips >
|
Debbi Della Porta