If You Use the Web, You May Have Already Been Enlisted as a Human Scanner

[FloridaJudy]

SciAm.com, August 18, 2008 By Adam Hadhazy

You're just about ready to buy a pair of tickets on Ticketmaster, but before you can take the next step, an annoying box with wavy letters and numbers shows up on your screen. You dutifully enter in what you see—and what a bot presumably can't—in the name of security.

But what you may not know is that you also have helped archivists decipher distorted characters in old books and newspapers so that they can be posted on the Web.

You might think that computer scientists would have figured out a way to get computers to decipher those characters. But they haven't, so instead they've figured out a way to harness all that effort you're making to protect your security. "When you're reading those squiggly characters, you are doing something that computers cannot," says Luis von Ahn, a computer scientist at Carnegie Mellon University (C.M.U.) in Pittsburgh.

This sounds like an inspired idea, but I think they need to work on the ethics. There's something a little creepy about being used as an uninformed research subject, though I can't see any obvious risks to the user.

Full article here: http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=human-book-scanners-on-the-web&sc=rss

[dbonds]

1. I don't see any harm and lots of benefits

Many sites need a CAPTCHA system to distinguish people from programs, that just had the added benefit of helping archive books. It is a system called re-captcha. It is a nice complete CAPTCHA system for anyone that doesn't want to code their own - and they are harder than you think to code ones that aren't program readable.

[notesdev]

2. Wait a sec...

This doesn't quite make sense. If they don't already know what the characters are, how can it be used in a verification process? What are you going to compare the user input to, to see if it's real or a bot trying to bluff?

[Indenturedebtor]

4. Hahaha true. Perhaps they could insert a "dummy" character

If you enter the dummy character you're good? :shrug:

[FiveGoodMen]

5. My first thought as well.

Maybe there's an answer, but it seems crazy that the article didn't address this.

[caraher]

7. It could still function as a "screen"

If there's one ambiguous letter chances are there are only 2-3 reasonable choices anyway. If you think it looks like a "6" and I think it looks like a "b" they could accept either entry but reject someone who enters a "j"

[FiveGoodMen]

9. Okay. That could work.

On the other hand, do suppose someone is going to all the trouble to set that up just to see if other people agree with their guess on what a smudged character really is?

[mainegreen]

13. The same text goes out to multiple people simultaneously.

Your answer is compared to the mob's answer.

The mob is considered to be correct.

[FiveGoodMen]

16. That makes sense.

[mike_c]

3. you're not "an uninformed research subject" at all....

Research subjects are the topics of research, not the tools used to conduct research. If anything, we're uncompensated research assistants, but a little altruism never hurt anyone.

[FloridaJudy]

6. I think over 99% of people

Including me would say "Sure! Why not?" when asked to help out - after all, I lend my computer to Stanford for their protein folding project when I'm not using it, and I don't see any possible risks to the user from being used as a scanner. But it could lead to a flood of "parasitic computing" which might not be so benign.

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=parasitic-computing-can-u

[Occulus]

8. Wow, that's wrong

"You might think that computer scientists would have figured out a way to get computers to decipher those characters. But they haven't,"

"When you're reading those squiggly characters, you are doing something that computers cannot,"

Complete nonsense. I work in a postal distribution plant, and we have industrial-grade optical character readers. The hardware and software can read cursive handwriting, for frak's sake.

AT TENS OF THOUSANDS OF PIECES PER HOUR.

Did they not realize this when the article was written?

[skoalyman]

10. I wouldn't be so fast on dismissing it here have a try

http://recaptcha.net/learnmore.html

[zipplewrath]

11. Different problem

Those machines know they are looking for addresses. They even have a basic format from which they are attempting to decipher information. Ambiguities can be sorted out by cross correlation (unsure zipcodes can be matched against vauge state abbreviations). This problem is slightly more complicated than that.

[Posteritatis]

12. Sure they did

Can your postal computers read variant alphabets? Make out faded or multiply-overwritten text? Font/script changes? Non-linear writing? Blocks of text which are obviously in nothing near normal-postal-address format? Writing 'projected' onto curved surfaces, or which is heavily overlapped by damage or other script/illustration/etc?

OCR ain't that hot, and postal services use a very specialized version of that. They'd fall down dealing with margin notes in sixteenth-century manuscripts and the like.

[joshcryer]

14. Postal addresses are composed of a few small variables. Just the zip code alone...

...allows the 'text' for the City/State to be completely ignored. Reducing the problem down significantly.

If you use an extended zip code then you need post no text at all, just a 9 digit number.

[Canuckistanian]

15. Speaking of Ticketmaster

There was a documentary on CBC that asked the question - How do these ticket reseller companies manage to snatch up nearly ALL the good tickets to popular events in a matter of minutes?

The answer was that these companies were using sophisticated scanners that could figure out almost any scheme of distorted characters.

The company spokespeople vehemently denied that they had even heard of any such software, but some insiders said that they had seen it working.

No investigations are even pending against these guys.

[skoalyman]

17. I wouldn't doubt it I spent a little time on the website thats under my

other post.Typing away on there website I managed to slip up a couple of times and it said it was correct when it wasn't so it wouldn't be hard to believe a bot gaining entry were its not welcomed.