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lazypuppy
Age. 39
Gender. Female
Ethnicity. Caucasian
Location Northglenn, CO
School. Other
» More info.
This is nifty
Sunday. 8.24.08 12:12 am
I saw this article online yesterday and I thought it was cool. Here's the link to it

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=93605988#share

All Things Considered, August 14, 2008 · People who use the Internet to talk to friends, set up free e-mail accounts or buy concert tickets are often unknowingly helping to digitize vast libraries of old books and newspapers.

That's because more than 40,000 Web sites — including popular ones such as Ticketmaster, Facebook and Craigslist — are using a new kind of security program called reCAPTCHA.

It's the brainchild of Luis von Ahn, a computer scientist at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, who helped develop another commonly used Web security system. That one, called CAPTCHA, will allow people to access a Web site only if they prove they are human — and not a spammer's computer — by typing in a sequence of letters or numbers that appear on the screen in a distorted or garbled image.

"Each time you type one of these, your brain is doing something amazing," von Ahn says. "Your brain is performing a task that, despite 50 years of research in computer science, we cannot yet get computers to do."

The trouble is, each time you type in one of these garbled words, you're also wasting time. Von Ahn recently realized exactly how much time was being wasted, and he found it demoralizing.

"Approximately 200 million of these are typed every day by people around the world. Each time you type one of these, essentially you waste about 10 seconds of your time," he says. "If you multiply that by 200 million, you get that humanity as a whole is wasting around 500,000 hours every day, typing these annoying squiggly characters."


Here is part of the article...the rest of the article is worth reading though. I learned something I never knew.
5 Comments.


Being a giant nerd, I subscribe to Science magazine, where I learned about this. I agree--totally freaking cool.

In fact, I just used reCAPTCHA today!
» ranor on 2008-08-24 01:28:22

This is really cool! I didn't know that those annoying letters I type to get into yahoo games waste so much of my time!
» Nuttz on 2008-08-24 02:23:29

Hm, I noticed the new two word thing, but never asked about it... It's kind of weird when you get one that says 'flamboyant wolf' or something though...
» randomjunk on 2008-08-24 12:43:02

That's really interesting.

And it helped me out a lot, as I need about 9 more articles for school tomorrow. Ha.
» bananaface on 2008-08-24 05:57:45

i hate typing those annoying letters....it drives me nuts. It is also the reason that I don't frequent those websites anymore.

I loved all the info in that article, very interesting stuff! Great find!
» pyrogrrl12 on 2008-08-24 10:35:06

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