Do you know what a CAPTCHA is? Yeah, neither did I. It happens to be that begrudging box full of wavy numbers and letters at the bottom of some secure web pages. You are forced to reiterate its indecipherable contents as a security measure ensuring that you are you, and not some computer program trying to generate spam. They are tedious to say the least-- particularly when you inadvertently mistype a 'q' instead of the desired '9', thus mucking up your whole process of registration on the site. Now that really gives me a bit of web rage.
That's why I was pleasantly surprised to see a bibliophile's CAPTCHA while verifying my intent to email an online mag article to myself on Democracy Now!
reCAPTCHA is a project out of Carnegie Mellon University's Computer Science Department and they claim to put this pesky precautionary puzzle to good use. Instead of writing codes containing the meaningless sequences of characters, reCAPTCHA has teamed with the Internet Archive to post words that folks can correctly retype, while also digitizing the word as part of a literacy project. Each CAPTCHA is a chance to make thousands of famous pieces of literature available to all in the public domain--a few words at a time. Here are the actual skematics of why human edit skills are needed to complete this feat.
Ingenious! If you have a need for CAPTCHAs for security and spam prevention, help recapture the written word for all to enjoy.
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