It would appear that there is an exploit in the registration system where hackers have found a way to bypass "CAPTCHA" on SMF and it's running wild. Yesterday we had 18-20 new accounts registered here on Our FamilyForum by these automated bots so we've installed a new CAPTCHA program here on forum to safeguard the registration process. The new utility also helps in a positive way by helping to digitize books so that people with impaired sight will be able to read them.
The quote below is from the 'reCAPTCHA' website, you can read the full text
HERE.
Digitizing Books One Word at a Time
reCAPTCHA is a free CAPTCHA service that helps to digitize books.
A CAPTCHA is a program that can tell whether its user is a human or a computer. You've probably seen them ? colorful images with distorted text at the bottom of Web registration forms. CAPTCHAs are used by many websites to prevent abuse from "bots," or automated programs usually written to generate spam. No computer program can read distorted text as well as humans can, so bots cannot navigate sites protected by CAPTCHAs.
About 60 million CAPTCHAs are solved by humans around the world every day. In each case, roughly ten seconds of human time are being spent. Individually, that's not a lot of time, but in aggregate these little puzzles consume more than 150,000 hours of work each day. What if we could make positive use of this human effort? reCAPTCHA does exactly that by channeling the effort spent solving CAPTCHAs online into "reading" books.
To archive human knowledge and to make information more accessible to the world, multiple projects are currently digitizing physical books that were written before the computer age. The book pages are being photographically scanned, and then transformed into text using "Optical Character Recognition" (OCR). The transformation into text is useful because scanning a book produces images, which are difficult to store on small devices, expensive to download, and cannot be searched. The problem is that OCR is not perfect.
