Here's a fun lil' trick. Ever need to implement a CAPTCHA on a website? Why make your own when you can be lazy and use someone else's and be helpful at the same time?

About 60 million CAPTCHAs are solved by humans around the world every day. In each case, roughly ten seconds of human time are being spent. Individually, that's not a lot of time, but in aggregate these little puzzles consume more than 150,000 hours of work each day. What if we could make positive use of this human effort? reCAPTCHA does exactly that by channeling the effort spent solving CAPTCHAs online into "reading" books.

Check it out: http://recaptcha.net/learnmore.html

This entry was posted on Monday, June 18th, 2007 at 1:23 am and is filed under Geekery, Useful Junk. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.