2008/08/29
human deCAPTCHA service
About 10 years ago, when .NET was put out as a strategy for providing software services over the internet, I jokingly quipped that across the API interface, it’s just a black box, you’ll never know if you have actual humans answering your queries and passing the data back, as long as it’s in the right format! Imagine if “Jeeves” were an actual person answering what you “Ask”ed. Or if some translation tool were actually human-powered. It’d be pretty cool in a horrible way, like a reverse Turing-test. Students of the Humanities may even call it “dehumanizing” but we’re all evil engineers so who cares… hohoho
But guess what, this is an actual industry. Here is an article that shows, to my great amazement, that people have not only taken this concept to heart to solve the real problem (for spammers and hackers) of automated CAPTCHA decoding by low-wage humans, but they’ve even managed to load-balance the whole thing to reduce latency! What … the hell!
(Read the article)
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