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Google acquires reCAPTCHA
- deleted 17y ago[deleted]
- byrneseyeview 17y agoI can't believe I didn't see this coming. Given Google's size and mission statement, any company whose business generates new data must partner with Google, sell out to Google, or kill Google if it wants to survive.
- antiismist 17y agoThat's an interesting insight but it goes too far. For example, Mint.com/Intuit and Facebook can survive independent of Google.
- maggie 17y agowho?
- spoiledtechie 17y agoGoogle has approached Facebook to be bought out...
- dabeeeenster 17y agoWhat? Why? You can write your own CAPTCHA or use another provider...Unless I'm missing something?
- lucumo 17y agoreCAPTCHA has some pretty good network effects due to the amount of data they have. reCAPTCHA detects suspect behaviour from IP addresses/ranges/sites etc. and blocks users based on that.
- seldo 17y agoGood move. Google wants to digitize all the books in the world, and reCaptcha does just that. Google could have tried just becoming a client of reCaptcha, but their scale would have crushed reCaptcha, to say nothing of the business risk of outsourcing a key stage of your signup process to a third party. The logical solution was to buy them and Google-size their infrastructure. From a personal perspective, I don't think this really changes how I feel about reCaptcha either. They'll still have the same mission -- unless Google stops them reading out of copyright classics and puts them onto scanning in Dan Brown novels, which I think is unlikely.
- amanfredi 17y agoGoogle already has a great captcha for their signup process. The primary motivation must have been the OCR benefits.
- shimon 17y agoOr the team.
- breck 17y agoOr the analytics. It's on 100,000 sites.
- seldo 17y agoIsn't that what I said?
- amanfredi 17y ago"to say nothing of the business risk of outsourcing a key stage of your signup process to a third party." I thought you meant that Google would have actually considered ditching their own captcha in favor of recaptcha for google sign-up.
- deleted 17y ago[deleted]
- gehant 17y agoSince reCaptcha tries to differentiate humans from computers/bots, I find it ironic that the same reCaptcha technology is being used to improve the accuracy of how computers scan text...
- ludwig 17y agoOnly because every time it gets stuck, it "asks" a human.
- elemenohpee 17y agoYeah I thought the article was a little misleading on that point. They made it seem like the human input was improving the OCR algorithms.
- asnyder 17y agoI would think that the human input is improving the OCR algorithms. I assume that every human correction trains the OCR in some way. With enough corrections the OCR should at some point learn to distinguish between the characters it couldn't before.
- apowell 17y agoI preferred thinking that the CAPTCHAs on my websites were doing a bit of good for the world - now I'm just facilitating free labor for Google's benefit.
- brown9-2 17y agoWell I think if anything that you are helping computers perform OCR better, which I would consider to be "doing a bit of good for the world", but I guess it depends on if you associate Google with "evil".
- sp332 17y agoCurrently, reCaptcha is digitizing old copies of the New York Times. I don't think that's changed.
- apowell 17y agoNo, but the deal was just announced today. I wonder if before long Google will use reCAPTCHA to digitize books as part of the Google books project - all without the permission of the original copyright owners. Edit - To clarify, I think that making information in the public domain more accessible is a very worthwhile project.
- lsb 17y agoAll the new books are pretty high quality, compared to old printing techniques. There's a lot of valuable Public Domain data that we're all itching to have, and having Google be the source for that is a distinct possibility.
- lsb 17y agoYou're still getting free bot-prevention. If you don't like it, use something like Damien Katz's Negative CAPTCHA (hide a field with CSS, call it email, and wait for a bot to fill it out, and check that that field is empty server-side).
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- Keyframe 17y agoI haven't even realized that recaptcha was a company.
- henning 17y agoI thought reCAPTCHA was a hip university research project.
- patio11 17y agoThey learned from the Google school of public relations. ("What, make money? Hah, hah, we're just a bunch of geeks who like interesting problems, no crass lucre here, no siree!")
- yan 17y agoWow, googling for 'crass lucre' brought this post up as result #2. Definition please? :)
- tokenadult 17y agoThe definition of "lucre" is monetary reward. http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/lucre http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/lucre The most common phrase that uses the word lucre is "filthy lucre," a reference to money being something that distracts noble people from pursuing altruistic goals.
- arram 17y ago"Vulgar profiteering"
- colinprince 17y agolucre is money, and crass would be one potential view on the acquiring thereof.
- mhartl 17y agoN.B. The official term is "filthy lucre".
- stingraycharles 17y agoWait. I must be missing something: Since computers have trouble reading squiggly words like these, CAPTCHAs are designed to allow humans in but prevent malicious programs from scalping tickets or obtain millions of email accounts for spamming. But there’s a twist — the words in many of the CAPTCHAs provided by reCAPTCHA come from scanned archival newspapers and old books. Computers find it hard to recognize these words because the ink and paper have degraded over time, but by typing them in as a CAPTCHA, crowds teach computers to read the scanned text. The way I understand this, is that the user is presented letters from archival newspapers and must type in the text he sees, and recaptcha uses that text to improve OCR. But doesn't that imply that recaptcha was unable to interpret the scanned text before ? If so, how can it then verify the correctness of the text the user types in ? If not, how exactly is this helping OCR ?
- apowell 17y agoreCAPTCHA presents two words. One is known, the other is unknown. The idea is that if you type the known word correctly, then you've typed the unknown word correctly as well. It also shows the same unknown word to many people as a distributed accuracy check.
- fizx 17y ago> But if a computer can't read such a CAPTCHA, how does the > system know the correct answer to the puzzle? Here's how: > Each new word that cannot be read correctly by OCR is > given to a user in conjunction with another word for which > the answer is already known. The user is then asked to > read both words. If they solve the one for which the > answer is known, the system assumes their answer is > correct for the new one. The system then gives the new > image to a number of other people to determine, with > higher confidence, whether the original answer was > correct. http://recaptcha.net/learnmore.html http://recaptcha.net/learnmore.html
- deleted 17y ago[deleted]
- jchonphoenix 17y agoSo reCaptcha uses a statistical accuracy and machine learning algorithms to compare the user input for the same word over hundreds of users. Thus by doing this they minimize the probability that a human who incorrectly deciphers a word skews their data. Also reCaptcha's present two words. One of which is known, and used as a normal captcha, the other of which is an unreadable word. Thus if a someone passes the captcha word, its somewhat assumed that he also correctly typed in the unknown word because the words are presented in randomized order. Finally, as a funny anecdote, Luis told me once of this time that they noticed there was a captcha farm in latin America paying pennies for poor latin american's to solve reCaptcha's for them in order to gain the ability to generate illegal spam. Luis started sending them whole sentences of reCaptcha's and eventually made it to full paragraph's. Ironically, the reCaptcha farm continued to solve these captcha's. He eventually stopped their activity, but he said the data they generated was some of the best he's ever gotten... :P
- biohacker42 17y agoI read this as Google basically giving up on CAPTCHA. Let me explain. For a while google had one of the hardest CAPTCHAs but bots just keep getting better, and they were cracking it more and more often. But you can't just make the CAPTCHA even more difficult, it was already fooling a lot of the humans. Note that a bot does not need to successfully solve it 100% or even 90% of the time. I'm not sure of what the exact figure is but at some point the bot reaches parity with humans even if it only succeeds say 25% of the time. That's because on average now it only takes 4 guesses to guess correctly. And I don't think reCAPTCHA is stronger then the multicolored CAPTCHA google had (still has?) I think google is realizing that they just can not stop the best CAPTCHA cracking bots, maybe they can stop a lot of them, or a lot of the not so smart bots. But they also can't just give on CAPTCHA, and let anyone and any bot in without even trying. Thus reCAPTCHA because you might as well do a little public good while you're at it. If nothing else, you've at least made some old texts more readable.
- mixmax 17y agoSome users from 4chan managed to hack recaptcha and embarrass Time magazine seriously at the same time not long ago. Basically they stuffed the ballots on the Time online voting page where users could vote for most influential person of the year. Most influential person ended up being Moot, founder of 4chan. Just to rub it in they managed to spell "marblecake also the game" out of the first letters of the top 21 entries. Note: This hack shows more about Time's incompetence than recaptcha's. In-depths story here: http://musicmachinery.com/2009/04/27/moot-wins-time-inc-loses/ http://musicmachinery.com/2009/04/27/moot-wins-time-inc-lose...
- mrduncan 17y agoThanks for bringing that up, I'd almost forgotten about that. The way I understand it, reCAPTCHA gives you 2 words to analyze, one which reCAPTCHA "knows" and one it is trying to learn about. As long as you get the word it knows about correct, it'll say you're a human. You're answer to it's unknown word is simply stored and (I'd assume) analyzed until it has enough responses to consider it a known word. Knowing this allowed 4chan users to nearly cut their response time to the captchas in half. I'd be fascinated to hear more details (or be corrected) on how reCAPTCHA works if anyone has them.
- sam_in_nyc 17y agoI think you've pretty much got it right. Once there's a significant amount of "agreement" on what a word says, reCAPTCHA will assume it's correct. My guess is it will keep unknown words in its "unknown" pool until a minimum amount of responses are given, AND the responses are in agreement over a minimum (likely very high) percentage.
- brown9-2 17y agoNo, they didn't come close to "hacking recaptcha": Update – Just to be perfectly clear, anon didn’t hack reCAPTCHA. It did exactly what it was supposed to do. It shut down the auto voters instantly and effectively. The only option left after Time added reCAPTCHA to the poll was a brute force attack. Ben Maurer, (chief engineer on reCAPTCHA) comments on the hack: “reCAPTCHA put up a hard to break barrier that forced the attackers to spend hundreds of hours to obtain a relatively small number of votes. reCAPTCHA prevented numerous would-be attackers from engaging in an attack. In any high-profile system, it’s important to implement reCAPTCHA as part of a larger defense-in-depth strategy”. As Dr. von Ahn points out “had Time used reCAPTCHA from the beginning, this would have never happened — anon submitted tens of millions of votes before Time added reCAPTCHA, but they were only able to submit ~200k afterwards. And to do this, they had to resort to typing the CAPTCHAs by hand!” One thing that Time inc. did that made it much easier for the anonymous hack was to allow leave the door open for cross-site request forgeries which allowed anon to create a streamlined poll that never had to fetch data from Time.com.
- beeker 17y agoIs Louis von Ahn going to work for Google as part of the deal?
- tlrobinson 17y agoHis name is on the blog post, so I assume he is. He's had a lot of neat ideas which align well with Google. I think he'd be a great addition to their team.
- fizx 17y agoHe's a professor at CMU. I imagine some grad students will go to Google, but I'd imagine he'll stay at CMU? http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~biglou/ http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~biglou/
- jchonphoenix 17y agoI'm currently doing research for Luis as part of Gwap, and as far as I can say, he's going to remain on the faculty at CMU but also work for Google out of the Google PGH offices. He's no longer teaching 251, however, which is what he's famous for around here (at least to students). What this means for me, however,...
- deleted 17y ago[deleted]
- fizx 17y agoI find it funny that Luis also posted: http://vonahn.blogspot.com/2009/07/hottest-people-in-cs.html http://vonahn.blogspot.com/2009/07/hottest-people-in-cs.html
- joshu 17y agoHeh. Now there are three TR35s from the same year at Google.
- DarrenMills 17y agoRighting your own CAPTCHA seems like a small task for Google. reCAPTCHA wasn't exactly encroaching on Google's market share... so what exactly did this get Google? I think they have a bigger plan, as always. Ideas?
- mercury888 17y agoyep - they are going to monetize captchas. How typical of google :)
- sam_in_nyc 17y agoIt's my guess Google is in this for the cookies and analytics that can be gathered by (however many) websites that use ReCAPTCHA. As a trivial side-note: When encountered with a ReCAPTCHA, I'll fill out one of the words and put in gibberish (or other text) for the other. For some reason I find it satisfying to "pull a fast one" on any captcha service.
- mseebach 17y ago> For some reason I find it satisfying to "pull a fast one" on any captcha service. Why? What do you achieve except being told you're wrong every once in a while? I mean, you're trying to bother a machine. Isn't that a bit like a reverse Turing test? I suspect the amount of noise that ReCAPTCHA filters out from automatic attempts is several orders of magnitude larger than anything any group of actual humans can generate.
- ryanpetrich 17y agoUnless you happen to be 4chan
- sam_in_nyc 17y agoIt takes no extra effort to enter in the wrong item, so the cost of doing so is about zero. As far as what satisfaction I gain from it... I suppose I find it to be a sort of rebellious act. Also, I did not get accepted into Carnegie Mellon.
- yarapavan 17y agoA list of about 50 scientific articles on "captcha" available at http://www.citeulike.org/tag/captcha http://www.citeulike.org/tag/captcha
- dunk010 17y agoThink of all the sites which use recaptcha for their signups - google will get some interesting stats through this.
- gengstrand 17y agoIt's a brilliant move in using collective intelligence. You get better quality CAPTCHAs. You get more accurate digitization on the cheap. I go into more detail on this at http://it.toolbox.com/blogs/future-of-work/google-acquires-recaptcha-34202 http://it.toolbox.com/blogs/future-of-work/google-acquires-r...