10 years ago
6
Apparently reCAPTCHA has Digitized All the Books
When I first came across the reCapctha project, then at Carnegie-Mellon, now a Google owned product, I thought the concept was one of the most clever things ever.
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Wow I never knew that's how the digitization worked. That's reallly smart.
Similar to how google used their free 411 service to learn user's voices and accents which would then be used for voice technology such as voice commands and such.
Crowd sourced engineering at its finest.
It is, kinda. But there is a pretty big problem: people sought to pollute that great idea by identifying the "puzzle-word" and typing offensive terms instead. As long as the controller word is okay, the captcha will accept your login/comment/whatever. How it worked and how people took advantage for lulz is pretty good explained in →this VERY NSFW picture.
Kinda sad, actually.
If it helps, the guy who developed recaptcha was aware of the issue and made sure that any entries containing that word were ignored: See this reddit AMA.
Yep, anything that is crowd sourced can easily be exploited. Sadly, the only error here is the human error.