reCAPTCHA and email contacts

I came across a new project this week called reCAPTCHA that promises to deliver some social good while helping block spambots from harvesting email addresses. This project from the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University has two pieces: on-demand generation of those odd images containing letters and number one must correctly type before, say, creating an account or posting to many websites and a similar feature that blocks access to an email address by requiring the same thing be done before it’s revealed.

CAPTCHA is the geek made up acronym for those images, which are generally random strings. The reCAPTCHA project puts a community twist by getting the string from images of book image scans from the Internet Archive, so not only are our resources protected but the effort in deciphering the image also helps get more books digitized. To decrease the probability of spammer-controlled machines beating the image–real words are considered simpler to recognize by software, which is why random sets are used–users must type in two words. For accessibility support, an audio test is available as well.

On billsaysthis.com I’ve used it to link my name, towards the bottom of the right sidebar, to my email. Please give it a try and let me know if it works for you. I expect to use it in a new Ruby on Rails project that will be out soon and wherever I put an email or create resource link.