Something interesting I've noticed recently with reCaptcha

dirtbag

dirtbag

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I noticed a few days ago colored images of numbers being used as one half of the recaptcha captchas. Just now I saw one and I think I finally figured out what they are. The one I just saw look an awful lot like gold address numbers screwed on over vinyl siding. I think it is entirely possible Google is decoding numbers found in images from their Street View cameras. Perhaps attempting to create some new feature within Google maps.

Has anyone else noticed anything like this. i started to take notice maybe 3 or 4 days ago now this new implementation. This one was undeniably an image from the front of someone's home. I should have saved the image I guess. Anyone else share this opinion?

Has there been any announcements or literature on the subject yet? I'm curious whats going on now, and just what the ol' G has up it's sleeve this time...
 
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Here's my little StreetView reCaptcha collection if you haven't taken notice yourself yet. I've been doing a little Googlng trying to see whats up. Much to the dismay of my ego, I was obviously not the first one two make the connection between reCaptcha and StreetView. There doesn't seem to be any Google statement on the move though. I'm going to have to go out on a limb and say that we're going to see some new features introduced to StreetView at some point coming up though. Seems odd that they'd care enough to decode the numbers found in their streetviewimage collections without reason. Maybe they're just running out of books to digitize? lol mmmmm, Google speculation...

NMRZd
 
I too just saw my first "new" version today using the keyword tool. I tried googling it up when I came across it but didn't really find anything substantial.
 
Well I have absolutely no doubt that they are coming from the StreetView cameras. I'd love to know why Google cares to be able to connect the exact address to the picture of your home. or business. I suspect it would greatly enhance the StreetView functionality to be able to punch in an address into GoogleMaps, and have it show you the exact building you're looking for. At the same time it brings up that slightly paranoid uneasy feeling you can sometimes get when you consider that maybe Google is just going a little too far with things.

Perhaps it's something much more benign though, like using real world characters to create a captcha that is more impenetrable by automated captcha breakers. There's no real standard to the charcters used in this type of image, so it would be pretty hard to create a automated OCR type captcha cracker for these.
 
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Haha, what would you know. Apparently someone at TechCrunch is reading BHW? I subscribe to TechCrunch on Facebook, and I just saw this pop up today.

http://techcrunch.com/2012/03/29/google-now-using-recaptcha-to-decode-street-view-addresses/

What would you know, they even used my image in their article. Hell, I even got credited! So where do I send the bill for getting BHW a TechCrunch backlink?

Also Ian, I expect your check in the mail for the backlink you've received too. Whoever the hell you are...

PS. I feel as guilty as that dickhead Pinterest spam article backlinking BHW a bunch now, lol. Like I am going to be somehow responsible for another flood of retarded newbs. Sorry guys, lol.
 
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Would you look at that view count rise! A TechCrunch mention can send some quick traffic, lol. Too bad that's not pointing at one of my sites :shrug:
 
Well the reason they are doing this is to most likely make there system more accurate since they can decrease work load by making us do it.
 
Slashdotted too...

Code: 
tech (DOT) slashdot (DOT) org/story/12/03/29/2055228/google-using-recaptcha-to-decode-street-addresses
 
Engadget, Geek.com, Gizmodo, and Inforworld, amongst a score of others now. I finally get some content to naturally go viral and it's absolutely useless to me, haha.
 
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Brings back memories from operation renigger...

Maybe we should start putting 199 for every one of these to fuck up the system?
 
dirtbag said:
I noticed a few days ago colored images of numbers being used as one half of the recaptcha captchas. Just now I saw one and I think I finally figured out what they are. The one I just saw look an awful lot like gold address numbers screwed on over vinyl siding. I think it is entirely possible Google is decoding numbers found in images from their Street View cameras. Perhaps attempting to create some new feature within Google maps.

Has anyone else noticed anything like this. i started to take notice maybe 3 or 4 days ago now this new implementation. This one was undeniably an image from the front of someone's home. I should have saved the image I guess. Anyone else share this opinion?

Has there been any announcements or literature on the subject yet? I'm curious whats going on now, and just what the ol' G has up it's sleeve this time...
Click to expand...

I saw this on Digg last night. Pretty stupid of G, actually. Don't they realize that so many captcha solving services are using humans?
 
It depends how we will look at this. On spammed ips many times I got chineese characters or flipped text..
Streets numbers are much easier for captcha monkeys
 
They will never be able to beat out human typers. They can try, but what's the point in a captcha that no human can manage to type in? As long as there's some guy sitting in India willing to type 1000 captchas for $1, reCaptcha is essentially useless. Due to the wide variety of colors, text styles, and so forth, I do think these images would be pretty difficult to develop an automated solution for though.

I don't think that was what they were aiming to accomplish though, and it seems they are more interested in perfecting their data for the StreetView service.

reCaptcha offers Google an endless supply of labor for digitizing all kinds of data into their info-horde. It's probably one of their better acquisitions over the years, and it holds infinite possibilities really. Google is the master of crowdsourcing in this respect. Just think for a while of all the things they could photograph or scan, pull text from, digitize all the data through reCaptcha, and organize into a searchable database.
 
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Something else I just took notice of that made me curious. It would seem that the "known" word always has the black circle in these captchas. I never stopped to take notice of the text only captchas, but would it be safe to say that even in text only captchas, that the circled word is always the "known"? Anyone have any experience with that?
 
Dont you mean the other way around?

Here it is always the hard word with the black circle, and the easy one without.
 
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