"But then I started feeling bad: Each time a CAPTCHA is solved, 10 seconds of human time are basically wasted," von Ahn explained. "If you multiply that by 60 million, you get that humanity as a whole wastes about 150,000 hours every day solving CAPTCHAs. That's a lot of time!"
Although this isn't spammail, it's an indicator of how much waste is generated by deceptive/unwanted techniques on the 'net.
This highlights one of the big examples of how ineffective the Republican admninistration/legislative branches have been, with their "Opt-Out" ideas on spam, etc., rather than sticking to conservative principles and requiring opt-in, etc.
Thank goodness for some of the waste being put to good use now, at least.
BTW, I hire illegal aliens to type my CAPTCHA tests. There, I hijacked my own thread! :-)
So if I understand this correctly, people solve the little tests, jumbled letters, and now those solved tests are actually going to be whole digital books down the road?
Yeah, but think of the number of hours wasted every day by all the people watching Oprah. Now that's depressing!
Bump for later reading on CAPTCHA
Umm, what's to stop this "learning" from passing along to the spam robots, this allowing them to pass the test and send even more spam?
Very interesting article! What they are doing is taking the human readings of distorted letters and weighing in on what most people thought the letters were - thereby establishing a pattern for interpreting distorted letters.
I’m a translator and do some paleography, so I have the occasion to spend time with writing that is very difficult to read (from the point of view of my century). I have always wondered how that problem was going to be solved technologically, because I knew it would be, someday.
I think this could have considerable impact on many areas. It’s a brilliant idea.