A beautiful synergy

Tom James @ 15-08-2008

we_the_peopleIn a wonderful example of what Jeff Bezos describes as Artificial Artificial Intelligence researchers at Carnegie Mellon University have developed a system whereby words from old documents that cannot be read by OCR scanners are used as CAPTCHAs to prevent spamming ‘bots accessing websites, thereby simultaneously assisting in digitizing our written heritage and hindering malicious spammers, from the ScienceNOW article:

The team developed a new program, called reCAPTCHA, which collects words flagged as unreadable by optical scanners as they digitize texts. Those words, in the form of computer optical scans, are then sent to cooperating Web sites and used in place of random CAPTCHAs. The software presents one optically unreadable word and one “control” CAPTCHA word. Getting the control word right identifies the user as a human, and the program records his or her response to the unreadable word and adds it to a database.

[story at ScienceNOW via KurzweilAI.net][image from Thorn Enterprises on flickr]


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Spammers Defeat CAPTCHA?

Jeremiah Tolbert @ 10-07-2007

In the war between spammers and everyone else, the spammers may have captured new territory. A new trojan appears to be capable of bypassing the CAPTCHA systems on Yahoo and Hotmail, allowing spammers to create 500 bogus email addresses per hour. CAPTCHA tests are the distorted images of text that computers have previously been unable to read. They’re a kind of simple Turing Test meant to require a human behind a keyboard when creating a new email address.

I am suspicious of the claim that the trojan is actually somehow able to read these images, which have thus far been impossible to crack as a security measure. New Scientist Blog agrees. 500 an hour is not very fast. There is some trickery at work here, perhaps in the form of passing the CAPTCHAs from Hotmail to another website where humans are doing the solving work for the spammers.


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