reCAPTCHA

En ole aivan varma kuinka monella eri tavalla tämä on mahtavaa (äkkiseltään mieleen tulee ainakin neljä), mutta reCAPTCHA on spämmintorjuntamenetelmä blogeihin ym. webbiin, joka samalla auttaa kirjojen digitoinnissa.

Homma menee näin: monien blogien kommenttilaatikoiden tai muiden webissä täytettävien lomakkeiden ohessa on sellainen tehtävä, jossa pitää kirjoittaa jokin vaikeasti luettava sana tai muutama pieneen tekstilaatikkoon. Idea on se, että tietokone on huono lukemaan tuollaisia vääristeltyjä tekstinpätkiä, mutta ihminen on luontaisesti sellaisessa erittäin hyvä. Tarkoitus onkin erotella ihmiset koneista kun ei haluta että mikään tietokoneohjelma käy täyttelemässä noita lomakkeita, yleensä roskapostin lähetystä varten. Tällaisen nimi on captcha.

Noniin, on olemassa sivustoja jotka tarjoavat näitä captcha-palikoita joita sivun ylläpitäjät voivat upottaa omille sivuilleen. Tyypillisesti juuri blogeihin, mutta myös erilaisiin äänestyksiin ja palvelujen rekisteröitymislomakkeisiin niitä laitetaan. Luis von Ahn katseli päivänä eräänä oman palvelunsa tilastoja ja mietti, että vaikka palvelu tehokkaasti estää roskapostin ja muun kuran lähettämistä webiin, joka kerta kun ihminen täyttää tuollaisen captcha-testin, hän tavallaan haaskaa 10 sekuntia elämästään. Ja kun sadat miljoonat ihmiset täyttelevät testejä päivittäin, aikaa valuu hukkaan todella paljon. Noh, Luis keksi että jos tuo captcha ei olisikaan joku koneen luoma tekstinpätkä niinkuin ennen, vaan sellainen sana  jota kone ei ymmärtänyt kirjaa digitoidessa, voitaisi roskapostia vastaan taistelevia ihmisiä käyttää samalla tekstintunnistuksen oikolukemiseen. Siitä syntyi reCAPTCHA. Lainaus webbisivulta:

But if a computer can’t read such a CAPTCHA, how does the system know the correct answer to the puzzle? Here’s how: Each new word that cannot be read correctly by OCR is given to a user in conjunction with another word for which the answer is already known. The user is then asked to read both words. If they solve the one for which the answer is known, the system assumes their answer is correct for the new one. The system then gives the new image to a number of other people to determine, with higher confidence, whether the original answer was correct.

Paraikaa meneillään on vanhojen New York Timesien digitoinnin oikoluku. Olen toki nähnyt noita captcha-palikoita vuosikausia, mutta en ole aiemmin tiennyt tästä oikoluku-aspektista. Tämä on sellaista kirjastotyötä jossa minä haluan olla osallisena!

Lähteenä CBC:n Spark jakso 91. Much love <3

Captcha fail

Picture by: buzzboyz198302 Submitted by: buzzboyz198302 via Fail Uploader

So i was going to try and cover a lot more. I had all these ideas that I had been working on, and I was just waiting for time to sit down and have some time to myself where I could put everything into a logical format and turn that into a blog post. Then, as I started to do this, my first idea developed into what i believe to be a worthwhile blog topic all in its own. The idea: take advantage of your customers. Seriously. Let me explain:

Example #1 — Google: Look at the BIG Picture! Try to make decisions with the future in mind. It may sound simple, but I’ll elaborate. I’m not saying that doing something that will benefit you now is a bad idea — perhaps its something that fulfills customer(s) needs or makes your business more efficient, but what else. In my opinion, those are good and necessary things, but let them be a byproduct of a larger scale goal — let the ends justify the means. Afterall, this is what google does — and it’s almost always flies under the radar.For example, look at Goog411 and recapcha. Goog411 is a great google app. it makes people happy, it works well, and most importantly, it’s free. what’s REALLY most important, is what it does for google. Every time someone uses Goog411, it improves the system google has in place for voice recognition. Google is giving customers a free 411 service and who cares what the cost is, because they’re having their customers improve their algorithms, refining voice recognition and [truly, now] most importantly, giving google the best voice recognition capabilities in the industry — and they continue to improve every day.
They did the same thing with the purchase of recaptcha. Recaptcha uses letters from old (like, really old) books, magazine articles, newspapers and the like as captcha for security. Why? Because computers can’t read the text and, in a situation where you want to guarantee an authentic and secure transaction, you rely on people to type the text in correctly. So, why did google buy this? Not to authenticate transactions. No, instead google purchased recaptcha because they can use their customers to improve their software’s ability to read old documents. You don’t have to be a genius to understand why google wants this — they can create larger, more searchable archives of data, of documents, of everything — and most importantly, they can do it at almost ZERO cost. How? Very simply, because they’re smart.

Example #2 — facebook: Taking advantage of your audience is evidenced again in Facebook’s support. Rather than spending (hundreds of) millions of dollars to translate facebook into various global languages, facebook crowdsources the bulk of the work. Sure, it wasn’t free — but relatively speaking, it cost facebook nothing at all. Facebook asked its audiences to help make translations accurate by asking audiences to choose “which sounds better.” As a result, facebook is now available in 64 (and that number is growing every day) languages. The audience was happy because they were a part of the development of facebook into their native language, and facebook was happy because they found a way to go global and save tons of money

Example #3 — waze: for those of you who are unaware, waze is a new Turn-by-Turn navigation app for the iPhone. However, there is one HUGE difference between waze and the rest. AT&Ts turn by turn app is a subscription-based service. Navigon and TomTom offer applications that cost almost as much as the phone itself. Why do AT&T, Navigon, and TomTom charge for the apps? The answer is very simple — because they’re expensive. The R&D that goes into developing the apps themselves is expensive. Keeping the maps up-to-date is expensive. Navigation in general is just all around expensive. So why is waze free? The answer is simple there, too — because they’re smart. By that, I simply mean that they’ve taken advantage of their audience. Waze uses its customers to develop the application. If you drive into an uncharted territory, you’re actually developing the map for the application. Simply put, waze learns in real time. What’s more, it has a cool social component [think, yelp, yellow pages, and live traffic -- all built by the audience]. What’s even more interesting is that it turns your venture into “uncharted territories” into a game [think pac man meets connect the dots]. Waze launched in Taiwan and was able to go from nothing to more than 92% of the country mapped (and more accurately done than traditional turn-by-turn devices) in less than one year. Pending how heavily the app is adopted in the US, the very same is possible here.
What’s more is that waze has managed to think big picture here too — once they’ve got accurate maps along with a strong database, they plan to sell them to more traditional navigation companies. In my opinion, that’s very well thought out, and has significant potential.

Lesson #4: twitter: twitter is crowdsourcing at its purest and simplest form. simply put, the trending topics are the news. sure, people are on twitter for all kinds of reasons, but the trending topics themselves are, in my opinion, enough of a reason for a noob to join twitter. covering everything from natural disasters to celebrity gossip [and everything inbetween], twitters trending topics give onlookers an unbelievable accurate picture of what’s going on right now. if there’s an earthquake, an election, a war, a death, or an historic achievement, chances are that you’ll find out via twitter before ANY international news sources pick up the story. twitter, among many many other things, has crowdsourced news, in a sense, developed a free, accurate, and real time look at the globe’s hot topics. Most notably, it’s all indexed and searchable. This has led to twitters unbelievable valuation and, according to just about everyone, it really is worth it.

So…these are just a few examples of crowdsourcing and it’s success, but i truly believe that it’s got huge potential. An obvious prerequisite for the whole idea is that you’ve got to have a large enough audience. I’m not saying I know how to get to that point, but once you’re there, it’s a great way to innovate. Give your audience what they want, but make it benefit you too. Whether it saves you time and/or money or it just opens up new opportunities in the future.

Google ha tornat a sorprendre mig món amb un moviment tan inesperat com hàbil. El 16 de setembre anunciaven oficialment la compra de reCAPTCHA, un servei de CAPTCHA molt popular, amb la característica afegida que ajuda a digitalitzar llibres i diaris antics.

Un CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart) és un sistema d’autenticació que intenta determinar si l’usuari que vol accedir-hi és un ésser humà o una màquina, mostrant paraules o seqüències de caràcters una mica distorsionades que l’usuari ha de reproduir en una caixa de text. L’objectiu és evitar que els robots es puguin registrar a determinats serveis -per exemple, obrir un compte de correu electrònic per enviar correu brossa- o participar a enquestes.

Quan es digitalitza un text imprès s’obté una imatge. Per convertir aquella imatge a text i poder-hi fer cerques, exportar-lo, editar-lo o escalar-lo, cal passar un programa de reconeixement òptic de caràcters (OCR). Depenent de diversos factors -qualitat de l’original, suport, tipografia- el reconeixement és més o menys precís i els errors habituals, la qual cosa fa el procés lent i costós.

Text digitalitzat i text reconegut després de passar l'OCR

La particularitat de reCAPTCHA és que mostra dues paraules. La primera no té cap característica especial, però la segona ha estat digitalitzada prèviament d’un llibre o diari antic i l’OCR no l’ha reconegut. Si l’usuari reprodueix correctament la primera imatge, el sistema assumeix que també ho ha fet correctament amb la segona, de manera que la feina que l’OCR no ha estat capaç de fer, l’ha fet l’usuari gratuïtament. Segons reCAPTCHA es resolen al dia uns 200 milions de CAPTCHA arreu del món. Amb la col·laboració sovint inconscient de milions d’usuaris s’hauria pogut arribar a un nivell d’exactitud superior al 99,5%.

Tenint en compte que un dels projectes estrella de Google és justament Google Books, entenem de seguida l’interès per adquirir la companyia. L’endemà d’anunciar la compra de reCAPTCHA anunciaven un acord amb On Demand Books que permetrà imprimir a demanda qualsevol dels dos milions de llibres de domini públic prèviament digitalitzats, des de qualsevol llibreria o institució que hagi adquirit la Espresso Book Machine.

PS. El Turing a què fa referència l’acrònim CAPTCHA és Alan Turing, de qui ja hem parlat abans, i concretament al Test de Turing però a la inversa.

Font: Vida digital

[Content originally posted for Overdrive Interactive]

This past week, Facebook was ranked one of America’s most trusted companies, blew past the 300 million mark in total users, and hinted at the release of voice chat powered by Boston-based Vivox. Google increased its ever-growing hold on the web with its acquisition of reCAPTCHA, whose technology they can utilize to help with large text-scanning projects such as Google Books. The company also released Google Public Sector, which offers tools and best practices for public sector collaboration. Following up on the sale of the popular VoIP and chat service Skype comes a lawsuit by the founder’s who are suing eBay for copyright infringement of a core peer-to-peer technology found in the program. Finally, Bing continues to skyrocket in popularity among other search engine services.

• Facebook to Launch Voice Chat – On its way to implementing a video chat service within its platform, Facebook will be rolling out a voice chat feature during the next couple weeks. The technology for the service is being offered by Vivox, a Boston-based company that has created voice chat applications for virtual worlds. Voice chat will work seamlessly within the Facebook framework, and support everything from one-on-one chats to group discussions.

• Facebook Tops 300 Million User Mark – In a blog post on Tuesday, Facebook CEO and Founder Mark Zuckerberg announced that not only was the service now in the green, but that it also had recently passed the 300 million user mark. The growth of Facebook has actually be accelerating, as it took only 5 months to reach this milestone, compared to the 8 months it took to make it from 100 to 200 million users.

• Facebook In Top 10 of Most Trusted US Companies – Facebook is now ranked as one of the ten most trusted companies for privacy in the US. The study was conducted by TRUSTe and the Ponemon Institute, and consisted of a two-stage survey which focused on the “privacy policies and practices of leading consumer brands.”

• Google Takes Over reCAPTCHA – Google continues to gain power over the web with its recent acquisition of reCAPTCHA, whose technology is used to power many of the captcha security boxes to make sure the user is in fact a human, and not a robot or spammer. Google will use this technology to power large scale scanning projects such as Google Books.

• Google Public Sector Launched – The US Government, after recently declaring that it will be making use of many of Google’s cloud-based products to streamline operations, now has apps specifically designed to work with the public sector. The page is more of a directory and information site for government agencies and organizations, and will help these entities to coordinate more effectively.

• eBay Sued For More Than $75 Million Per Day – eBay, who recently sold Skype a few weeks ago to a group of private investors, is now being sued by the software’s creators for copyright infringement. The main focus of this lawsuit is around a core piece of peer-to-peer technology that Skype uses and which Janus Friis and Niklas Zennstrom have been attempting to reclaim since early March.

• Bing Currently Fastest Growing Search Engine – Microsoft continues to make strides with its new search engine, with official data coming from Nielson MegaView Search that Bing has a month-over-month growth rate of about a little over 22%. Compare this with the second largest growth rate of 2.9%, and it becomes apparent that Bing is quickly on its way up the popularity scale when it comes to search engines.

Things are truly looking good for Facebook these days. Now that the service is finally making money, albeit only $2 per person, and will soon be implementing video and voice chat features, it seems as if this social networking giant is on an unstoppable course to dominating the social market. The fact that Facebook is also one of the most trusted companies in the US will do well to solidify the service’s future growth, and should be a source of great concern for competitors such as Twitter, of which Facebook has recently launched a full-scale assault upon. Does Facebook have the momentum and power to ultimately become the only social networking service worth using?

Meanwhile, Google continues on its never-ending domination of the web with the acquisition of reCAPTCHA. The technology and service is featured on over 100,000 sites worldwide, and in addition to providing increased security for Google’s services, will more importantly allow the company to improve their books and newspaper scanning process. This will undoubtedly give Google Books and Google News Archive Search a significant competitive edge. The release of Google Public Sector shows that not even the US Government can escape Google’s reach. Not that they were trying very hard in the first place however, with Apps.gov already featuring a whole suite of Google cloud-based applications. Is Google becoming too much of an influence in the web market?

eBay thought they had seen the last of the Skype debacle, however Janus Friis and Niklas Zennstrom, the original creators, have other plans for the online-auction giant. It seems that the core peer-to-peer technology featured in Skype was copyrighted to Mr. Friis and, as every download of the program is seen as a copyright infringement, the founders are seeking a mere $75 million dollars per day in damages. Most likely this amount will be reduced significantly once the investigation is underway, however other online companies should make note of this situation. With the proliferation of ideas and technology becoming more readily available in the online world, lawsuits have become more plentiful as the claimed creators seek to defend their ideas, or make a quick buck.

Bing continues to show impressive growth when compared to other popular search engines. Though still far behind in total searches, the service is quickly closing the gap. More recently, the growth has been due to a large-scale advertising campaign launched by Microsoft. The fusion of Twitter and Bing search results (bingtweets.com) and the recently launched visual search have also helped to ratchet up popularity of the still relatively new search service.

Following on from the books theme, I came across this great presentation by Luis von Ahn, the inventor of Captcha and reCaptcha.  He explains the story of how these two methods of online authentication came about and what they are actually used for. This is amongst a number of very interesting nubs made by the Computing Research Association, click here to view their channel on Youtube.

Google adquirió un programa desarrollado en la Universidad Carnegie Mellon que busca reducir el correo indeseado y el fraude electrónico, mientras digitaliza libros.

Con ReCAPTCHA, los usuarios deben completar juegos de palabras sencillos para poder registrarse en una página Web o al completar una compra electrónica. Señala Gonzalo Tirado Hightech que las computadoras por sí mismas no pueden descifrar letras o números torcidos, el producto garantiza que realmente son clientes y no programas automatizados los que están manejando el tablero.

Pero ReCAPTCHA ofrece algo más: los juegos de palabras provienen de libros reales, lo que hace que el sistema vaya creando versiones digitales de los textos a medida que los usuarios introducen las palabras.

Google Inc. ya estaba desarrollando un proyecto importante de digitalización de libros para colocarlos en internet. En la mayoría de los casos, los “escaneaba” y luego empleaba un programa de reconocimiento óptico de caracteres que permiten usar buscadores en el texto. Sin embargo, esta técnica no siempre funciona en libros con deterioros o con letras distorsionadas. En esos casos, la opción era teclear a mano la obra.

ReCAPTCHA ofrece otra alternativa al tomar los fragmentos que la computadora no reconoce y separarlos en palabras individuales que son usadas en las pruebas de seguridad en internet. Luego, ReCAPTCHA vuelve a recomponer el texto del libro con las palabras introducidas por los usuarios, agrega Gonzalo Tirado Hightech,.

Luis von Ahn, profesor de Carnegie Mellon, quien desarrolló la herramienta y fundó la compañía ReCAPTCHA en el 2008, señaló que el programa es ideal para Google.

Google has acquired reCAPTCHA and plans to use the system for digitizing books. Wait… what? CAPTCHA is the method of requiring a user to type in a visually obscured word to prove they are human. How can this digitize books? The answer is a bit obscure and takes some time to discover, but you’ll have fun along the way.

The Google blog links to a Google TechTalk video on Human Computation as an example of how they plan to use their new acquisition. It’s embedded below but at 51 minutes we figure most won’t watch it all so we did it for you. This fascinating discussion looks at how people are already being tricked into solving CAPTCHA challenges, and shows several tested implementations of getting people to input cognitive data computers cannot, under the guise of playing games.

Spammers have to beat the CAPTCHA system in order to get large numbers of free email accounts.  There have been examples of software overcoming this test such as the greasemonkey script that beat MegaUpload’s security, or Time Magazine’s poll being hacked. But, for the most part, only humans can pass the test. People seeking to bypass millions of CAPTCHA challenges either pay for sweatshop laborers to solve them or, more creatively, they get you to solve them when cruising for porn. This is the proof of concept; we can use people to interpret words computers cannot if we use the right carrot.

Talked about in the video, the ESP game was written in order to correctly tag photographs.  Players are shown pictures and asked to type what they see.  The round keeps going until the two have typed the same word. With a lot of players, and proper safeguards, these tags are incredibly accurate. Furthermore, the game has been very popular and has the potential to accomplish herculean feats in short amounts of time (namely, tag every image in Google’s image search in just a few months).

It seems that Google plans to use these methods to digitize books that are otherwise very difficult to scan with Optical Character Recognition. According to the video, 9 billion human hours were spent playing solitaire in 2003.  What if a small portion of this time could be diverted over to playing games that added to the digitized knowledge cache? If the right type of verification game can be developed it will allow Google to tap society as their typing minions. It’s an interesting proposition and frankly we hope to see it happen.

Estos ultimos días, el Gigante de Google, compró la Empresa recaptcha.

Esta se dedica a proveer un sistema de captchas gratuito a miles de webs. Su funcionamiento es simple, elige dos palabras, una que no haya conseguido leer una máquina y otra que sí haya leído correctamente una máquina, las distorsiona un poco y te las muestra. Es muy util este Servicio, además de ser usado por muchas companías.

Está muy claro lo que gana Google con su adquisición, que estos últimos años se encuentra inmerso en una masiva digitalización de libros para ser indexados y subidos a su Google Books. Desde Google se asegura que el servicio seguirá funcionando igual que antes, con la única excepción de que los datos vendrán y serán usados por Google.

Vía | Genbeta

Captcha (que es un acrónimo que significa Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart)
reCAPTCHA, creado por la Universidad de Carnegie Mellon tiene 2 propositos basicamente, proteger los sitios contra bots y spam y digitalizar texto en libros.
Google ultimamente esta muy interesado en esto ultimo, ya que hizo arreglos con diferentes bibliotecas para comenzar a digitalizar libros, cosa que, en mi opinion es algo grandioso y genial, para Google Book and Google News Archive Search.

There’s nothing we love more than warped words (or random numbers and letters) we have to type in before we’re allowed to comment. These CAPTCHAs cut down on spam (and, sometimes, legitimate comments. grrr.)—and every once in a while, someone comes along with a great idea to make that kind of technology useful, like reCAPTCHA using words scanned from old texts that OCR software can’t recognize.

A great idea, right? It’s so popular more than 100,000 websites have signed up to use the specialized CAPTCHAs, including Facebook and craigslist. I’m sure you can guess how this story ends: Google buys reCAPTCHA.

This is doubly beneficial for Google:

They get cooler CAPTCHAs than the random strings of letters they’ve been using on Blogger and other services.They get free help decipher unintelligible words in their Google Books, Google News Archive and other scanning projects

Of course, there’s one little problem on this cool feature—if the computer couldn’t recognize the word in the first place, how will it know if you typed the right one? That’s what the second word is for—one of the words is one the computer already knows.

reCAPTCHA was a free, open source project, so with the way it’s structured now, it won’t be adding to Google’s bottom line.

What do you think? How else can this be beneficial to Google? Are they likely to start charging large clients for reCAPTCHAs?

Social Media Monitoring in Just 60-Seconds. Guaranteed!

reCAPTCHA

Compania reCAPTCHA a fost achiziţionată de cei de la Google. reCAPTCHA este un furnizor de servicii anti-spam. Pe viitor îi va ajuta pe cei de la Google la anumite proiecte gen Google Books.

Ca să vă fac să înţelegeţi ce e CAPTCHA am să vă dau un exemplu. Intraţi pe Yahoo de exemplu şi vă faceţi o adresă de e-mail. Completaţi toate datele, iar la sfârşit vă cere să tastaţi literele/cifrele dintr-o imagine. Aceea este CAPTCHA şi este folosită pentru a împiedica spam-ul cu ajutorul boţilor. Pretty clever!

Source : Silicon

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reCAPTCHA is a free CAPTCHA service that helps to digitize books, newspapers and old time radio shows. Check out our paper in Science about it (or read more below).

A CAPTCHA is a program that can tell whether its user is a human or a computer. You’ve probably seen them — colorful images with distorted text at the bottom of Web registration forms. CAPTCHAs are used by many websites to prevent abuse from "bots," or automated programs usually written to generate spam. No computer program can read distorted text as well as humans can, so bots cannot navigate sites protected by CAPTCHAs.

About 200 million CAPTCHAs are solved by humans around the world every day. In each case, roughly ten seconds of human time are being spent. Individually, that’s not a lot of time, but in aggregate these little puzzles consume more than 150,000 hours of work each day. What if we could make positive use of this human effort? reCAPTCHA does exactly that by channeling the effort spent solving CAPTCHAs online into "reading" books.

To archive human knowledge and to make information more accessible to the world, multiple projects are currently digitizing physical books that were written before the computer age. The book pages are being photographically scanned, and then transformed into text using "Optical Character Recognition" (OCR). The transformation into text is useful because scanning a book produces images, which are difficult to store on small devices, expensive to download, and cannot be searched. The problem is that OCR is not perfect.

Click here for more info…..