Legal Research

You know those annoying collections of distorted letters you have to decipher and type into a box in order to use a variety of internet services?  What you're doing is proving that you're a human being, not a spammer's computer.  And you may find them slightly less annoying from now on, because of an amazing example of human ingenuity.  Luis von Ahn, who developed the security software, called CAPTCHA, calculated how much time people around the world waste deciphering the letters and typing them in and was appalled.  Every day, 500,000 hours are spent on this irritatingly difficult activity.  Von Ahn realized that people can do what the software that performs Optical Character Recognition (OCR) often cannot, read blurred or stained old print.  So he invented reCAPTCHA and teamed up with the New York Times and the Internet Archive.  The Times is digitizing its archives, and the non-profit Internet Archive is digitizing books.

Now, people are confronted with two images, the first is the typical distorted letters puzzle, the second is a word from the digitizing projects that has baffled the OCR.  And actually, since it is a word, the second is easier to type than the first.  So next time you curse the security software that stands between you and internet Nirvana, take pride in the fact that you are helping to digitally preserve the paper past!  Thanks to NPR's All Things Considered for reporting this story.