More on the Box Beneath the Comments

One of our loyal Web laborers downstairs gave me some more info about the Captcha box. Apparently you’re helping to make the world a better place, or something, when you comment on our blog:

This version of captcha was developed by Carnegie Mellon University, and is considered to be one of the best (to avoid spam).

The words people type aren’t just random either. They’re actually digitizing old books, two words at a time:

“By entering the words in the box, you are also helping to digitize texts that were written before the computer age. The words that you see were taken directly from old texts that are being scanned and stored in digital format in order to preserve them and make them more accessible to the world. Since some of the words in these texts are difficult for computers to process, we are using the results of your efforts to help decipher them.”