One of the ways of protecting one’s blog comments from spammers is to add a captcha functionality: it displays a distorted image of a word – or at least of a few letters. This is supposed to prevent automated spamming programmes to drown your site with spam. Ah well, it’s not going to last forever. See this RentACoder Bid:

I have a program that will display an image with letters on it, i need you to type these letters into the textbox on the program and press enter each time to submit the image with the text you typed. After you submit the text, a new image will show, keep doing this over and over.

The images and letters recorded will be saved to my database to train an OCR algorithm i’m working on, it needs atleast 5,000 images deciphered. I don’t have the time to do this my self, this is where you come in.

NOTE: You must have a fairly FAST connection or it will take you a long time to do 5,000. If your really fast it should take you one second to submit one image with atleast 5 letters on it. If you have a SLOW connection, it will take twice or three times as long!

If you bid on this and cannot finish 5,000 images in 2 days, I will only extend the dedline under extenuating circumstances. If you have a slow internet connection, you will not be able to complete this project within 2 days. If you have a DSL/Cable Modem it will take you 1-5 hours. If you have anything slower (not recommended) it will take you 2 days non stop to finish this. Keep this in mind before bidding!

PLEASE POST YOU’RE INTERNET CONNECTION WITH YOUR BID REQUEST. Your internet connection will determine whether I pick you and whether I will give you a bonus when the project is done.

Good Luck!

Basically this dude wants to recruit low-cost web monkeys who will enter the answer to 5,000 captchas. Whether the thing behind this is really an OCR application or whether it’ll compute hashes of the image and associate that to the answer is debatable. Nonetheless, it shows that captchas – beside the obvious accessibility issue – are not going to last as a solution to spamming. I’ll sit in my corner of the web and look out for the next thing

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 8th, 2006 at 3:03 pm and is filed under Code, Brain fart of the day, All you freak are belong to you. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.