CAPTCHA... makes me want to punch the internet

...quite a few things make me want to "punch" the internet. More and more, I just think some people need to turn off their computers and actually go outside.

 

But the big circle in the sky burns me so.

 

I read an interesting and funny thing about reCAPTCHA a little while back, basically a lot of the weird crumbled words are from old documents that haven't been translated yet. So the programs used to detect "spam bots" also double up as a way to get the public to make sense out of old **** companies like Google want to digitize.

Spoiler

#3. When You Use reCAPTCHA, You're Translating Old Documents

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If you have signed in to basically anything on the Internet these days, then you're most likely familiar with the whole CAPTCHA program. That's the thing where you have to prove you're not a spambot by typing some nearly unreadable words into a box:

Well, this is awkward.​

What you may not know is that by using it, you've most likely contributed to the translation of thousands of old documents.
In 2009, Google and a couple of other companies had a problem. They wanted to digitize years of old newspapers and books, using software that can "read" the print it's scanning and then convert it into actual text. But even the most advanced computers had problems reading some of the poor quality scans, because the text was smudged or crooked, or in a font that has been out of use for years.

google recaptcha​

We remember the Smudgy Smear font came packaged with Windows 3.1.​

So, they simply placed those unreadable words in between you and your porn, and told you that you'd need to translate them before going any further. Spambots can't read them because reCAPTCHA uses only the words that the computers already said they couldn't read. It's as brilliant as it is simplistic. The program is called reCAPTCHA, and you've probably seen it this week, if not today. It's currently used by Facebook, Ticketmaster, Twitter, 4chan, CNN.com, StumbleUpon, Craigslist, the U.S. National Telecommunications and Information Administration and thousands of other smaller sites.

google recaptcha​

"We'll put lines through them, too. Because **** nearsighted people."​

And the project is a huge success, managing to digitize 20 years of The New York Times daily newspaper in just a few months, by letting Web surfers decode the hard bits. It is estimated that websites display 200 million reCAPTCHAs a day.

Getty​

Over the years, we've managed to get the word "dongs" into the NYT editorial column 17 times!​

Read more: 5 Mind Blowing Things Crowds Do Better Than Experts | Cracked.com http://www.cracked.com/article_1943...wds-do-better-than-experts.html#ixzz22Fuwm8oe
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So yes knowsbleed...it IS kind of a conspiracy, even if it's a slightly lame one.

 

So we are doing their work? I demand payment!

 

I am a member of Swag Bucks, and in order to get my measly 2 SB's I had to enter this captcha: 'The Super Bowl is to Football as the World Series is to...' all in that horrible squinty lettering. I was like

 

They are quite frustrating & do make me punch the internet or screen senseless.

 

You hate them now, but when the machines rise they'll be the only thing that keeps them out of our bunkers.

 

And the humans. While we are deciphering the captcha the machines will be gunning us down at the door. Be like herding cattle. Let the humans flock to the door. Humans get stuck on captcha. Kill humans while they are distracted. Its the perfect plan.

 

Wait....if computers can't read it, how do they know if what you typed in is right or wrong?
They have to have been translated by other humans before hand.

 

Captcha doesn't annoy me, but I definitely would be annoyed if I saw them scrambled like that last example in the first post. Some weird things going on around the Internet.

 

I believe it's possible because reCAPTHCHA programs that are made for translating things usually put two jumbled words up for the user, and only knows one of them. The other one (the word the program wants to translate) you can, supposedly, type whatever you want for it and still gain access to whatever you were trying to log on to.

I'm gonna have to test this out and only seriously write out one word on an actual reCAPTCHA sometime...

 

CAPTHCHA doesn't annoy me as much as all the bogus, obviously, no-one-is-too-stupid-to-fall-for-this ads that are all over the place. You know the ones I'm talking about. The ones that basically rip eachother off. The ones that say... LANGUAGE PROFESSORS HATE HIM/HER. LEARN 10 LANGUAGES IN 5 DAYS. Or, and these are my favorite. 18 YEAR OLD BOY FINDS REAL SOLUTION TO PENIS ENLARGEMENT, NO JOKE! Sickens me. The people who make all this crap, and are desperate enough to try and fool people with such incredibly stupid **** need to be hurled into the sun. Get rid of them all.

 

Save all your passwords in a WordPad file? That's what I've done.

 

Those are the worst. They're about as annoying as chain messages.

I never click on ads at all, actually. Heck, I even have Ad Blocker for Google Chrome installed.

 

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It's funny because it's true.

 

Just wanted to bump this thread since Facebook integrated Captcha whenever a user posts links in chat. So now, Captcha is getting really, really annoying. And yes, there are the ones where they are just too close to impossible to read.

 

The product in the bold is not "crap". True, the ad is exaggerated, as you can't truly learn a language in 10 days, but their 90-day version is actually considered the best to get semi-fluent speaking skills by many amateur language learners.
Note: I do not work for that company. I do not like their exaggeration either and I find it to be quite sleazy, but I still wanted to point this out.

 

yay! a fellow swaggernaut

 

t:

Haha, yeah, I've been doing it for about two months. It's a good way to make a little extra.

 

I don't enter anything for the second word when they're a completely insane jumble half off the screen, and I usually get through.

 

Thanks to that lame system, I'm pretty sure I had to change my password about 13 times.