For those of you who are unfamiliar with the term, CAPTCHA’s are simply those pictures of random letter/number codes you are required to enter in a text box to proceed with a certain form.  For the most part, they are just random text and numbers, but every once in a while, they will spit out terms that can be considered offensive (i.e. “rape now”, “pness”, “nodick”, etc.).  While filters have been developed to prevent such things from happening, it can be difficult to catch everything.

From time to time we capture word verification silliness for posterity. It’s been a while, but we’ve got another for you, this time from Facebook - and this time it ain’t so silly.

The text reads: “rape now”. It was displayed next to the picture of a female work colleague our tipster (a Reg reader, of course) was adding to his list of Facebook friends?

While Facebook calls such scripts “security checks,” the rest of the world knows them as captchas, short for completely automated public Turing Test to tell computers and humans apart. The point is to display an image that’s not easily recognizable to a computer to ensure a real person is on the other end of a transaction.

The offending captcha was generated by ReCaptcha, a project sponsored by Carnegie Mellon University researchers working on a novel way of digitizing old books. Optical character recognition can stumble on as much as 30 per cent of the words it encounters. ReCaptcha displays them to users of Facebook and other sites. When they type in the corresponding text, the mystery is solved.[more]

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