Technology Telescope

At my day job — as has become the case at all but the most anti-social of companies — we have a Myspace page, Facebook group, Youtube channel, all of which are handled by an intern whose job it is to make these pages “look alive” by posting new content, swapping out background images, and making “friends.” In theory this sounds mildly entertaining, if a little repetitive, but in practice, whenever I look over at her screen she is deciphering cryptic garblings of letters to prove to a website that she is a human and not a computer. With the growing minions of spammers inventing fake names, friendships, and websites, it’s hard to go an hour on the internet without encountering a CAPTCHA test. “Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart.” While it may win the prize for most literal-sounding acronym of the year, CAPTCHA tests are actually reverse Turing tests: rather than a computer trying to trick a human into believing it is another human, as was the case in Alan Turing’s original test, CAPTCHA tests force humans to prove to a computer that they are, in fact, human.

But like the Canadian border, there will always be ways around. deCAPTCHA bots have been developed to segment the scrambled words into individual letters and read them using OCR (optical character recognition). When the bots can’t figure out those tricky words, spammers turn to sweatshop labor. An industry has sprung up in India with rooms full of human Captcha solvers who advertise with postings like this:

“1$ per 1K of CAPTCHA entries, and ready to produce 50 K entries per day. Kindly look forward procedures to provide the
chance to us”

“My rate $4.00 per 1k My team can work 24/7. They are jobless now”

“$3 per 1000 image entry, Ready start. 24/7 service like also. We have 30 pc 90 worker & 39 big captcha team so your any target we solve.”

Maybe I’ve just been watching eXistenZ too close to bedtime, but I do worry that these that these windowless data centers are creating some kind of electronic black hole for human souls. Here are these workers sitting at rows of computers, each one testifying “I am human,” hundreds of times per hour so that a robot may represent that humanity as its own.

CAPTCHA testing is the ultimate example of busy work — time spent proving the most basic conceit, that you are alive. But a recent collaboration between the reCAPTCHA team and the Google Books Project is adding a secondary purpose to the tests. Whenever a computer scanning a book comes upon a word it can’t read, it makes a reCAPTCHA and sends it out for website visitors to decrypt. It’s already been proven to be unreadable by machines and when a human deciphers the word, it helps Google with it’s book scanning project. Another example of a useful CAPTCHA is Microsoft’s ASIRRA test (Animal Species Image Recognition for Restricting Access), which challenges visitors to identify which images are cats in a line up of cats and dogs. Besides being way more fun than traditional CAPTCHA’s, the images each have an “Adopt Me” link which you can follow to Petfinder.com where visitors can actually adopt the homeless pets they used to prove their humanity. But don’t get too comfortable with your new labradoodle …the loud wooden clogs of spammers are only steps behind, reverse-engineering every ingenuity. In less than ten years image recognition technology will be at a point where computers can crack the cat/dog divide and then where will we hide? I guess the final frontier may lay in taste — can computers tell whether my date is sexy? Whether my shirt clashes with my sweatpants? I know I can’t.

Recommended Weekly Download:

Could there be a better soundtrack to score your fears about losing your humanity? A torrent of Kraftwerk’s complete discography is only a click away. Listen to the Man Machine while watching Metropolis for a Dark Side of the Server Room headtrip.