Google Using ReCAPTCHA To Decode Street Addresses

smolloy writes "Apparently some users of reCAPTCHA have recently begun seeing photographs appear in their CAPTCHA puzzles — photos that look very much like zoomed in house numbers taken from Google Streetview. It appears that Google has decided to put the reCAPTCHA system to help clean up Google streetview images, and 'according to a Google spokesperson, the system isn't limited to street addresses, but also involves street names and even traffic signs.' A large collection of these has appeared on the Blackhatworld website."

Be a Roman harlot instead!

[AliasMarlowe]

And put your house number in Roman Numerals. Nothing like living in number CLXXIV to screw up the recaptcha. Anyone answering with 174 is likely counted as wrong...

Re:This is actually kind of frightening...

[medlefsen]

Oh shit
http://www.whitepages.com/ [whitepages.com]

Re:Be a Roman harlot instead!

[gnick]

And put your house number in Roman Numerals. Nothing like living in number CLXXIV to screw up the recaptcha.

Not to mention the postal service! Damn snooty mailmen with their eagle-logo cars and fancy uniforms... Now I know how to get back at them.

Re:I'm a Microsoft whore

[Anonymous Coward]

ReCaptcha will accept any sequence of symbols for the unknown word.

Wait - you can type something other than "nigger" for the unknown word?

One of these days I'm going to do that when someone's looking over my shoulder and get a serious WTF from them.

To whoever modded the parent at -1, pay attention.
Out of the two images you are presented, one is known, the other is unknown. When a large enough number of people have entered the same answer for the unknown image, it gets moved to the 'known' list with that particular answer.

So on some places like 4chan, there has been a large effort to get as many people as possible to answer the unknown image with the word 'nigger'. If enough people do it on a single unknown image, it will get added to the pool with the "correct" answer set to the word 'nigger'... thus polluting the reCaptcha system. As the percentage of polluted entries in the "known" image list grows, so does the chance that the answer to any reCaptcha is 'nigger'.