If you've been on the Internet for longer than five minutes, you've surely encountered a CAPTCHA. As one of the most popular methods to prevent bot registrations, automated messages and cutting down on spam, CAPTCHAs are a source of both controversy and joy for users and administrators everywhere.

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Where did the $500MM-$700MM source come from? Article cited referred to that as a rumored price for brightcove.

You are right. We misread the linked source and have since corrected the post. Thanks for pointing that out.

i used to play this online game and it had captcha all over the place ... ihate it

reCaptcha is a failure. There's already hundreds of bot able to bypass it.

but the sucess rates of these bots are really low i guess

I dont know how its teaching computers to be 'more effective readers' when all it does is find words that OCR cannot distinguish and give them to a human to decipher.

Its a really interesting process which is currently digitizing every issue of the NYTimes, you can read about on their website [url]http://recaptcha.net/digitizing.html[/url]

Or a highly recomended TED talk [url]http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/brewster_kahle_builds_a_free_digital_library.html[/url]

(I think thats the one, cant access at work)

MrBondy

In responce to the Guest who says they are a failure... True - in general captcha's are week (6 seconds to break hotmails captcha 04/2008) and I once saw a review of a bot which could break the majority of captcha's except googles, which if you ever forget your gmail pasword you will know how incredibily difficult the words are to distinguish.

But reCaptcha works, because its not just a Captcha - Its a method of digitizing text at a rate of 150,000 man hours per day.

MrB