Captcha the flag

Real Life Captcha via here
If I could force rank my blogging pet peeves, the Number One Grand Prize would go to the proliferation of Captcha in the comment section of blogs.  My heart drops when I see the scrambled puddle of letters and numbers.  It's almost hilarious to watch me frantically clicking refresh so I don't have to pop my eyeballs out of my skull deciphering if that's really a "n" or "r" or "m."

Hatred of Captcha is widespread and one thing that people around the world actually agree on.  99.5% of the Internet thinks that Captcha is bad (I wonder how you come up with a sample set of the "Internet" to survey) and it's no wonder.  One in four people fail a Captcha on the first try and 25% of people leave sites when presented with Captcha.

CAPTCHA stands for "Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart."
It was a dark, stormy night in 2000 when Luis von Ahn and his colleagues at Carnegie Mellon discovered Captcha.  The hour was late and outside the wind howled mercilessly.  Lightening flashed across a gloomy computer lab, briefly illuminating the pasty pale faces of the young geniuses as their fingers hammered away at their keyboards.  Thunder clapped in close proximity and almost simultaneously, von Ahn screamed "It's ALIVE."  Or at least that's how I picture it in my head.

In 2007, von Ahn realized that Captcha was wasting a lot of time (duh).  With 200 million Captchas typed daily at the time, humanity as a whole was wasting 500,000 hours on Captcha security codes every day.  Thus, like a reformed villain, in 2008 von Ahn created reCaptcha which allows for each human-typed response to help digitize books one word at a time.  reCaptcha allowed the New York Times to digitize 129 years of archived newspapers in the span of 24 months.  The tentacled Google monster, with its uncanny ability to sniff out and grasp a profitable enterprise from the depths of the Internet, acquired reCaptcha in 2009 and is using it to advance its Books project - the ultimate goal of which is to transcribe every book in the world.

So the next time you get frustrated at Captcha and are ready to chunk your computer, monitor and keyboard out a ten-story window, it might make you feel better to know that you and your tiny contribution are helping transcribe books into digital editions for future generations to read.  Either that or you'll just get even more angry that you're helping the Google monster in its endless quest for world domination.

Sources:
Hegarty, Stephanie. "The evolution of those annoying online security tests." BBC News
"The Captcha Madness." Visual.ly

Comments

  1. I love what reCaptcha is doing but I still freaking hate captcha. It drives me nuts every time I see it and I miss it on the first try about 9 times out of 10.

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  2. Thank goodness that they reinnovated captcha for that. Part of me really likes it, but hates it as well ( especially in the comments - thank goodness I got rid of it a little while ago. XD ). It's really interesting to see how far computers and optical character recognition has come, and but nothing matches the human's ability to identify letters yet, hence all the recaptcha work.
    Anywho, I actually wonder how many scammers captcha manages to catch...though I'm not sure if an accurate measure on that is possible.

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  3. I am glad there is at least one reason for its existence now. I NEVER get it right. Never. And then I get really annoyed.

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  4. ha, very interesting. I hate captcha, of course, but I hadn't even bothered looking up what it stands for. and seriously, the name, or rather acronym alone is fricking ridiculously over the top! but you are right, it's not all evil. thanks for the enlightenment :)

    xxx

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  5. I still hate captcha:( I mean, it's good to know that at least, all that effort is not going to waste, but I still hate it:(

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  6. It's cold comfort for the aggravation. I'd like to see them outlawed or simplified. Were you picturing the Young Frankenstein version? That's what I imagined you picturing. :)

    Hmmm, the percentage of people not liking captchas and the percentage of people using them appears to exceed 100%. Must be one of those, "fine for me, but not for thee" types of things.

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  7. I'm not a fan of CAPTCHA either, but I use it on my blog because when I don't, I get at least 50 spam comments an hour (not exaggerating). Between CAPTCHA and closing comments after a certain number of days (which also has its drawbacks), I've got spam down to just an occasional one. If I knew a better way, I'd use it.

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  8. If the code was at least was shown properly - mostly I have no clue of what it says and I swear it´s hurting my eyes! :-D

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  9. PS - I'd like to play Kick the Can with captchas.

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  10. oh gosh i hate those things too! they always make them so blurry and small it is like how can anyone read that?! i have mixed feelings about helping the google monster hahah
    -Jessica
    http://www.jumpintopuddles.com/

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  11. Lol! You always manage to make me laugh Rooth! I groan out loud when I see these stupid things in the comments section, it's easier for me to delete spam than fill these out! I never manage to get them first try and by that time, my comment seems irrelevant anyway!

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  12. (re)Captcha is evil. Though I didn't know the transcribing books bit.

    Of course, Hitler instituted the Kindergarten system--so, there's that.

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  13. HA! Awesome post! I'm glad to know I'm not alone in my loathing of le captcha. And thrilled to learn what it stands for! Although the (re)captcha bit is fascinating. I had no clue!

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  14. Wow, I always suspected that a lot of people actually leave sites because of captcha, but I didn't think it was that many.

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  15. Oh, the wrath I have for Captcha. But I had no idea there was a good side! Now I will feel less rage-y about having to enter them all the time. Did you see that now they're including pictures of house numbers in the mix, too? That makes me 10 times worse at it, haha.

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  16. Wow, thanks for the explanation. I HATE Captcha but it's cool to know what it's there for.

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  17. Hmm, that's interesting. Obviously I hate it (I can never read them - I'm sure they used to be easier?) but it is clever what you can do with these things.

    I can't really imagine my biscuits with gravy. They didn't quite feel savoury enough although I suppose they were. It's only my second experience of biscuits (made Joy the Baker's chicken pot pie with cheese & chive biscuits - YUM) so I clearly have things to learn... x

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  18. Bahaha, SO glad I'm not the only person who loathes Captcha. Seriously, it's gotta go. Forever.

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  19. HAHAHAH. That's so funny :) I know...it hurts my grandma eyes too...

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  20. Wow, very interesting indeed! I still hate it though haha! xo

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  21. This is so interesting! Thanks for sharing this with us.

    I find captcha so annoying as well - I usually fail on the first attempt - everything looks so blurry, and then I have to turn on the speakerphone and hear the letters. I tend to then avoid leaving comments on sites that have it!

    Happy to know yours is captcha free :)

    Cheers!

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  22. i hate it so so much. my heart sinks too. it's so burdensome for bloggers. i've written about this a lot before actually!

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  23. I'm there with you... I love it when Kristal had a campaign to get rid of them... We all should do one because they drive me crazy!!!

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  24. I've been reading blogs all day today, and on some occasions, I was re-entering words like 4 or 5 times!!! Thanks for the reminder it's actually helping to do some good...
    Ronnie xo

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  25. was that the actual purpose? typing out words for google? I doubt that since what captcha usually asks seems to nonesense and house numbers but at least since I'm one of the 95%, I suppose I don't feel bad that more people hate captcha as much as me.

    hope you're having a good day.

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  26. I suppose it serves us well to know the history of the Captcha, a.k.a. a source of aggravation and annoyance for 99.5% of people. Thanks for the info share.

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  27. Love this post because I learned something! Captchas seem to be getting less and less alphabetical and numerical, it's soooo annoying! All bloggers really need to take it down asap.

    But on a positive note, technology is pretty amazing.

    Hope you have a fantastic labor day weekend!

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