[poll=36]
Do you hate captchas as much as I do? Perhaps as much as pop-up ads, even if both are small time compared to DRM?
Yes, I understand the reasons. Project Gutenberg, for example, will use ’em to reduce the burden that nonhumans may place on its Plucker conversion routes—although luckily they’ll kick in only on the less popular books (the ones not in a cache and in need of live, on-the-fly conversion).
And of course captchas are common on WordPress blogs burdened by spam. I may yet have to resort to ’em. But I’d rather not.
150,000+ collectively “wasted hours” a day
About the only other great thing I’ve read about captchas—horrors for the disabled, by the way—is that a Carnegie Mellon researcher has used ’em to facilitate the mass digitization of classics. At least Luis von Ahn has the good conscience to have felt bad, because every time you solve a captcha, you waste 10 seconds.”
As reported in an MIT Technology Review article about his work (link fixed), “People around the world solve an estimated 60 million captchas every day, adding up to more than 150,000 wasted hours.”
Housekeeping: More TeleBlog items will appear from me by late afternoon, including thoughts on the Lorado (MobileRead link), Intel’s Metro-style notebook with E Ink to augment the LCD. Posts from others might come between now and then.
(Thanks, Garson!)
