Just what is going on with this security feature "reCAPTCHA" ?

Are you aware just what is going on with this security feature "reCAPTCHA" ?

You may be aware of the web security feature reCAPTCHA, that applies a simple ‘Turing’ test asking you to type in two words, that are poorly displayed, to confirm you are a human and not a software application, or ‘bot’, trying to hack their site. Well, there’s some interesting stuff going on here ....

ReCAPTCHA was originally developed by Carnegie Mellon University, and in 2009 was acquired by Google. And now, it’s available to any web site wishing to deploy such security to keep bots out. Moreover, its FREE. Awesome.. how cool is that ! I love Open Source Software communities.

Here's the Original reCAPTCHA "Classic" if you like, easy enough to use - all you do is type what you see - the rationalle being that the bot's cannot make out the words in the image.

Hah ,... Daleks 0 Mick 1

reCAPTCHA 'Classic'

Time moves on - and the chaps at google are clever... Now they have a 'noCAPTCHA' application. This uses some neat behaviroual analytics to guage the likely hood that you are not a bot.  

NoCAPTCHA 

Relax - its not big brother - rather gentle really, they simply track how the mouse moves within the CAPTCHA frame and their algorithms can detect bot or human... 

FNarrrr  Daleks 0 Mick 2

And if there is doubt after the noCAPTCHA test and the google brainiacs decide they are not sure about yout bio/silicon ratio they'll invite you to answer the following modern version of the classic reCAPTCHA question...

reCAPTCHA part Deux

They think its all over... it is now.... Daleks 0 Mick 3

But .... I can’t help myself – I’ve been around IT for <ahem> years and I had to ask myself ...”is it FREE, what’s the catch?”

And, guess what, there is a hidden agenda. BUT it’s still COOL. You may have wondered why the words you have to type are normal words. Well it seems, Google are digitising books for the internet.  And some of the words they scan in – their OCR software ( which reads the scanned text ) doesn’t recognise. When you are answering a reCAPTCHA question, the word shown is one of those indecipherable words the Google OCR didn’t recognise, and this is Google throwing it out into the InterWeb and gathering interpretations from you and I. Google report that the system displays over 100 Milllion CAPTCHA's every day - not surprosing one major project, to digitise the New York Times back archive, is already complete.

So everytime you answer a reCAPTCHA question you are digitising a book. I said it was cool.