Carnegie Mellon’s ReCAPTCHA Enhanced Audio New Functionality

By Marc Handelman on December 9th, 2008

News yesterday of the Carnegie Mellon University’s ReCAPTCHA service’s innovative user functionality as part for their anti-bot authentication service (the transcription of audio books, and now vintage radio programming). We use it here at Infosecurity.US as part of our user registration service, and have been quite happy with it’s use. (Infosecurity.US is a Platinum Member of the Carnegie Mellon University Software Engineering Insitiute [CMU SEI]). More information regarding the ReCAPTCHA service appears after the jump.

From the ReadWriteWeb post: “As we have reported before, the reCAPTCHA service, which is based at Carnegie Mellon University, is not only an easy way to keep spammers away from your web sites, but is also an interesting experiment in harnessing human intelligence to transcribe old texts. To enable those with visual impairments to access those sites that utilize this system, the reCAPTCHA team has now also launched an enhanced audio version of the service, which will be used to transcribe old radio shows that speech recognition technology is not yet able to transcribe.

Security

As the team points out in a recent blog post, traditional audio CAPTCHAs based on distorted digits or letters are relatively vulnerable to automated attacks and can be broken by using machine learning algorithms. Indeed, Wintercore Labs, an IT security firm, showed how easy it would be to break Google’s audio CAPTCHA solution earlier this year…”