CAPTCHA Inventor Luis Ahn: Putting CAPTCHA system to Good Use

Internet Video Of The Day, Captcha, Interview, Wired

07 may 2008

Dr Luis von Ahn invented CAPTCHA images that websites ask you to type to post a comment or send an email.

Luis von Ahn, who invented the ubiquitous CAPTCHA system to prevent spammers from filling out Internet forms, talks to Wired Science about his research and other CAPTCHA related games he created to help people solve complex CAPTCHA images while still having fun. Thanks SEJ.

http://techpogo.blogspot.com Priyankeshu Parihar

I don’t think captcha has really helped way too much in cutting down the spam … especially in chat rooms it have nt worked..

may be in the blogs… and social networking sites it might have.. made a lil difference ….

But cause of captcha the REAL user suffers..
Scott

I think it is very arrogant of Luis Ahn to say playing solitaire is “wasted human hours”. Leisure time is important for people to relax and “recharge” their batteries. Too much leisure time means laziness, yes, but people who never relax or have any fun aren’t healthy. So him labeling ALL hours spent playing solitaire (or similar games) and further that he will SOLVE that problem makes him sound like a micromanaging social engineering tech nazi.

What if one day, we have bureaus of “efficiency management” designed by people like him that collect every second of what we do at work, at commute and at home, and pronounce judgments on us, and therefore punishments or restrictions? I know some reading this will laugh and say “whatever”, but as facebook proves, the growing databases out there with everything we do, say, people we know is staggering, and there seems to be no concern with how these databases will be used on us / against us.

While that isn’t reality yet, this kind of crap is where it starts.

Captcha, by the way, is horrendous for people who are not good at seeing or comfortable with web pages. I am a computer support tech and it took one remote client 9 tries to get a captcha right just to get a web mail account. By the time we succeded she was furious (at me), and won’t even use web mail because now she has this “impression” how difficult it is thanks to this ingenious a-hole that has now forced his idea on the world.

Finally, I am very offended they used Dick Cheney as an example, without using the proper associated words “Dictator”, “Nazi”, “Traitor”, etc.

Technology, Software and Internet

CAPTCHA Inventor Luis Ahn: Putting CAPTCHA system to Good Use

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