User:Cristinac/TPDevelopment

What is CAPTCHA:

Completely Automated Public Turing Test to Tell Computers and Humans Apart

As the name suggests, Captcha is a test designed to distinguish humans from bots by providing an identification mechanism that would be difficult for the latter to circumvent, but not for humans. The origins of CAPTCHA lay within the hacking community, they were originally used as a method for allowing users to post about sensitive topics without having to worry about being monitored by lurking authorities. An example of this is leetspeak (1337 or Leet), which would convert words into look-alike characters.

CAPTCHA took a form that is more similar to the one we know currently in 1997, when the AltaVista team began working on a system to prevent Internet bots from adding active URLs to the AltaVista search engine platform. At the time, this was achieved by building puzzles and images which would not be possible to read with the help of OCR. Ulterior versions would be made by Luis von Ahn, Manuel Blum, Nicholas J. Hopper and John Langford, who coined the term in 2003.

With reCAPTCHA, the useless puzzles were replaced with text that was unrecognized by OCR during book digitisations. The new model would contribute to making knowledge readily available in a digital format while proving to be effective against unwanted visitors. reCAPTCHA was bought in 2009 by Google and since 2012 has been used to determine the house numbers from the Street View project.

More recently, however, Google released a NO CAPTCHA system, which consists of asking the user to tick a box in order to state that they are not a robot. The method behind this new version is unclear, except for the few details that it tracks the mouse's movements and looks for human-like activity in the user's cookies.

Why CAPTCHA

CAPTCHA generally is understood as a test of humanness, it was originally used as a way to communicate without mechanical supervision. However, I was more interested in it as it relies on human understanding to make up for what computers cannot process. It is the collaborative aspect between the two that drew me to it, together with the fact that it has been an active force in helping digitize information.

Uses of the software since its implementation with Google have conflicted with the intentions of the reCAPTCHA makers.

About Sense-making

CAPTCHA is also a direct reference to the moment an image is translated into information.

About Open Access Publishing

Open access (OA) means unrestricted online access to peer-reviewed scholarly research. Open access is primarily intended for scholarly journal articles, but is also provided for a growing number of theses, book chapters, and scholarly monographs.

Open access comes in two degrees: gratis open access, which is free online access, and libre open access, which is free online access plus some additional usage rights. These additional usage rights are often granted through the use of various specific Creative Commons licenses. Only libre open access is fully compliant with definitions of open access such as the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities.

The Bethesda and Berlin statements add that for a work to be open access, users must be able to "copy, use, distribute, transmit and display the work publicly and to make and distribute derivative works, in any digital medium for any responsible purpose, subject to proper attribution of authorship."

About Information Society

"An information society is a society where the creation, distribution, use, integration and manipulation of information is a significant economic, political, and cultural activity. The aim of the information society is to gain competitive advantage internationally, through using information technology (IT) in a creative and productive way. The knowledge economy is its economic counterpart, whereby wealth is created through the economic exploitation of understanding. People who have the means to partake in this form of society are sometimes called digital citizens."

Beniger, James R. (1986). The Control Revolution: Technological and Economic Origins of the Information Society. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

About Immaterial Labour

According to Antonio Negri, one key characteristic of the information society is the immaterial labour that goes into it. Following the Silicon Valley ethos of providing a platform for free information, it is no longer necessary for websites to create their own content, this will be supplied by the countless information workers in exchange for gratis services.

"The picture is one of a circulation of commodities, webs of information, continuous movements, and radical nomadism of labour, and the ferocious exploitation of these dynamics… but also of constant and inexhaustible excess, of the biopolitical power of the multitude and of its excess with regard to the structural controlling ability of dominant institutions." Negri, Antonio. "On Rem Koolhaas." in: Radical Philosophy. No. 154, 2009. (English).