Man, I haven’t heard of CAPTCHA sweat shops before I watched this Google TechTalks video. Those freakin’ spammers would do anything and exploit anyone to make a stupid buck.
Check this out.
Video Blurb: "ABSTRACT Tasks like image recognition are trivial for humans, but continue to challenge even the most sophisticated computer programs. This talk introduces a paradigm for utilizing human processing power to solve problems that computers cannot yet solve. Traditional approaches to solving such problems focus on improving software. I advocate a novel approach: constructively channel human brainpower using computer games. For example, the ESP Game, described in this talk, is an enjoyable online game — many people play over 40 hours a week — and when people play, they help label images on the Web with descriptive keywords. These keywords can be used to significantly improve the accuracy of image search. People play the game not because they want to help, but because they enjoy it."
Comments (2)
They’ve made relatively simple/cheap neural nets that can understand human speach in a noisy room with better accuracy than a human. I don’t imagine it will be too long until they have them that can figure out captchas.
Personally, I think I may need to offshore my blog commenting, ’cause I have about a 50% success ration on captchas. It sucks they’re necessary.
Here we go with another one! Keep your fingers crossed…
Yah, I was surprised that you still used the things for your blog here. I figured you’d heard about comment spam mills long before I did
There is at least one software program that works for blog comments just like the Gmail spam filter, where individual humans report spam as they get it and Google uses that info as a collective human spam filter. I think I read about it on ProBlogger.
Personally, I just do my filtering by hand, which is dumb, but it’s not annoying enough to make it worth my while to figure out how to instal and manage another piece of software.