Stop helping reCAPTCHA digitize books on your free labor!

reCAPTCHA is a popular CAPTCHA system which prides itself on digitizing books (words that fail OCR) every time users are forced to solve their annoying CAPTCHAs.

The way it works is by sending 2 words in the CAPTCHA, one which is randomly generated with a known answer (this one must be correct), and the other which is unknown and scanned from a book. For the latter word you can type any bullshit and it will pass.

How do you know which of the two words is the computer generated one? It's typically the harder of the two to read. It may have lines or other artifical features through it that you wouldn't expect to naturally find if you were flipping through an old maniscript. You can play around with it on the reCAPTCHA website as I've demonstrated on the video, a little practice makes it very easy.

One last thing. If you use the same bullshit response over and over it fails you, so you have to change it up.

Although it's unlikely that purposely typing the wrong answer will ever cause the digitized books to contain the wrong words (because they are chosen statistically), we can still take a moral stance and refuse to provide our labor against our will to reCAPTCHA. If I wanted to solve unnecessary CAPTCHAs I would get a job somewhere in India! And if I want to volunteer my labor for free, I can always find a much more worthy cause than making someone else money by translating books for them.

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• recaptcha
• captcha
• bypass
• solve
• moral
• slave
• labor
• digitizing
• books
• OCR
• internet

[Fiurahi]

Not sure if total fucking idiot or trolling...

[eikosaedron]

@Fiurahi I'm guesing you're a fucking idiot. You probably don't even realize google scans copyrighted books without permission lol (of which reCAPTCHA is directly involved). nytimes dot com/2011/09/13/business/media/­authors-sue-to-remove-books-fr­om-digital-archive.html

[fidlekid]

Hallo, worum gehts? Ich bin dagegen.

[Phoenix555315]

"against your will"? how exactly are they forcing you to sit and solve captchas?