Oh no, watch out for P word in your e-texts via reCaptcha

[joedevon]

Now this is weird (if it doesn't seem relevant, read to the end, and you'll see why I posted it):

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4...efeated-broken

Hacking Recaptcha (aka ‘The Penis Flood’)

The next tactic used was to see if they could find a flaw in the reCAPTCHA implementation. One thing they discovered about reCAPTCHA was that it always presents two words to a user for decoding - one word is a control word known by the reCAPTCHA system, while the other is an unknown word (reCAPTCHA uses the humans to help correct OCR errors). Wikipedia describes the process: “Scanned text is subjected to analysis by two different optical character recognition programs; in cases where the programs disagree, the questionable word is converted into a CAPTCHA. The word is displayed along with a control word already known and is labeled by the human. Those words that are consistently given a single label by human judges are recycled as control words”. 2iasdo4 What Anonymous realized was that if they always labeled the unknown scanned text with the same word - and if they did this thousands and thousands of times eventually a large percentage of the unknown words would be mislabeled with their word. All they had to do was look at the two words in the captcha, enter the proper label for the ‘easy’ one (presumably that would be the one that the two optical scanners would agree upon) and enter the word “penis” for the hard one. If they did this often enough, then soon a significant percentage of the images would be labeled as ‘penis’ and the ability to autovote would be restored (one side effect, that was not lost on Anonymous, was the notion that for years to come there would be a number of digital books with the word ‘penis’ randomly inserted throughout the text. Update: I asked Ben Maurer, chief engineer of reCAPTCHA about this ‘penis flood‘ attack, Ben says that they’ve anticipated this type of attack and they have numerous protections that will keep the penises from penetrating the reCAPTCHA barrier.

I was going to make the title of this post, "Watch out for Penises in your e-books", but then I thought besides getting the post yanked, I would be banned too.

Oh what a world we live in when we can't read our e-books penis-free due to ineffective anti-spam measures that make life difficult for the blind...

(heck I have trouble getting half of those captchas right myself)

[Andybaby]

Penis is just a part of the male anatomy.

we have all got one, and if you don't, you probably want to get one.

and if you don't fall into either category, you're a lesbian.

also, no matter what, you have at one time, traveled inside one. so your really not allowed to talk.

Yes, you were once inside your fathers penis.

I hope the therapy bills arent too high.

[Sweetpea]

Originally Posted by Andybaby

Penis is just a part of the male anatomy.

we have all got one, and if you don't, you probably want to get one.

and if you don't fall into either category, you're a lesbian.

I don't want to get one! And I'm no lesbian... I already have some other things hanging on my body...

[joedevon]

Those that don't have one can easily get as many as they want. They just have to not say no.

[Andybaby]

Originally Posted by joedevon

Those that don't have one can easily get as many as they want. They just have to not say no.

ROFL. that's true.

unfortunately I don't own mine anymore. I just have orders to hold onto it and keep it clean for her use. and not to let anyone else play with her toy.

[HarryT]

Ladies and gentlemen - keep the conversation polite, please!

Thank you.

[Moderator]

[ahi]

Originally Posted by Andybaby

and if you don't fall into either category, you're a lesbian.

Now, now! We ought not discriminate against our fellow women who have, after careful deliberations, made an eminently sensible decision about the future course of their lives.

- Ahi

[Shaggy]

Originally Posted by HarryT

Ladies and gentlemen - keep the conversation polite, please!

It sounded polite to me.

[Andybaby]

Originally Posted by ahi

Now, now! We ought not discriminate against our fellow women who have, after careful deliberations, made an eminently sensible decision about the future course of their lives.

- Ahi

plenty of men too, but that choice is more made for you than made by you.

no matter what you believe

[ahi]

Originally Posted by Shaggy

It sounded polite to me.

More randy than polite, I would say.

Originally Posted by Andybaby

plenty of men too, but that choice is more made for you than made by you.

no matter what you believe

Really? I was always under the impression that my internal cognitive processes constituted a formative choke-hold on the realities of the outside world.

- Ahi

[snape]

Penis is just a part of the male anatomy.

we have all got one, and if you don't, you probably want to get one.

Curious that you could flip that around to be about boobs, and it would still be just as accurate...

[ahi]

Originally Posted by snape

Curious that you could flip that around to be about boobs, and it would still be just as accurate...

There are, of course, exceptions.

- Ahi

[griffonwing]

The reCAPTCHA is undoubtedly genius
But then someone had thoughts quite heinous
They typed the wrong word in
again and again
Now every other word is penis!

[Jaime_Astorga]

...and enter the word “penis” for the hard one.

...they have numerous protections that will keep the penises from penetrating the reCAPTCHA barrier.

Kudos to the writer for the puns.