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Comment by michaelcampbell | Hacker News Reader

The captcha looked quite clearly to me to be "inctory". These captcha's are not necessarily real words (I believe to thwart dictionary based crackers?), and I also am pretty sure the service they are using is not tied to Yelp itself.

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The first word wasn't the difficult one, it was the last word (it's even tougher to decipher when zoomed in for normal view. Zoomed out, it appears more like 'Law'). I agree though, I know the service probably isn't tied to Yelp, I just found it weird that I had to decipher a blob of ink on page 52.

If one word is completely illegible, it often isn't being used as a captcha. The captcha company may be trying to have you manually recognize text their OCR software could not.

You can often make it through after painfully screwing up the hard to read word.

That's exactly what's going on with ReCAPTCHA. One of the elements presented is a "known" that you have to get right, and the other is (usually) an unknown or ambiguous OCR result. Google is crowdsourcing their scans. And yes, sometimes it is just a blob of ink -- on other occasions, it's an inline differential equation or something similar that can't be properly entered into the text box (even with the whole of Unicode at your disposal). There's no penalty for getting the graecum est part wrong, but if it's something you can read but can't enter properly, do be a gem and don't pollute the pool of results -- hit the refresh icon.

This is how I do reCaptcha. I guess the easy-looking word correctly, and then type garbage for the hard-looking word. This results in approximately 99% correctness and hopefully screws up their "make jrockway do work for us for free" scam.

What scam? Google offers the reCaptcha service for free in exchange for having words OCRed; seems fair to me. To you as the user, it's not only the same work as any other captcha (which you would have to fill in anyway), but you get free OCRed books and magazines from Google Books.

If you don't like the reCaptcha ($deity know why, but it's your right), complain to the website, don't fuck it up for everyone else.

How proud you must be.

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