Project vandalize reCAPTCHA

by Matty Plat on December 15, 2008

You all know what a captcha is, even if you don't think you do. It's one of those mangled looking words that you have to type when you're registering for a website.

The one in the picture looks more strange than usual because it's made by a company called reCAPTCHA. They were clever and decided to enslave all of us for free labor. As far as I know, slavery is illegal. When you use reCAPTCHA, one word is used to verify you're a person, and the other word is used to digitize books and newspapers.

In essence, reCAPTCHA has us all typing for them for free. When I imagine this in my head, I think of millions of monkeys typing fortune cookies on typewriters like on The Simpsons. Hell no. We're more clever than this. We shouldn't have to do work for free.

I hope d'Annunzio doesn't kill me for calling him a penis.

PROJECT VANDALIZE ReCAPTCHA GO!

Because of the way reCAPTCHA is set up, you only need to get one of the words correct. They trust you to type the other one correctly. That word is used for the digitizing. However, we're going to type inappropriate words like PENIS instead.

Look closer at my example. Yep. I typed "valet PENIS" when I should have typed "valet d'Annunzio".

So if you're reading anything digitized and randomly come across the word PENIS, you have me to thank for your laughter.

I urge you to do this any time possible. If we work hard enough, every digitized book and newspaper across the land will contain nothing but the word "PENIS."

Exception If you're not crude and/or you don't believe in penises, type CollegeHumor.com instead of PENIS to give us some free advertising.

If you don't believe that this actually works, test it out here. You have a 50/50 shot at guessing which is the fake. Try twice and you're good to go. Now count how many times I used the word penis in this article.

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