Captcha

“I am not a robot.”

I heard parts of a long story on NPR’s “Mental Floss” a day ago. Here’s a brief summary. Its about the genius service that allowed every New York Times newspaper for a hundred year be digitized by the hundreds of millions of people who took words that computers couldn’t read and using human skills identify their letters. This was done in order to order stuff online. It turns out that this fantastic service has been used by nefarious hackers to break into the Internet. An arms race developed which pitted the CAPTCHA folks against the hacker’s robots. Will the robot handlers win the arms race?

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