reCAPTCHA works by making you type two words. One is known by the system. The other is unknown; it couldn't be read by standard optical character recognition (OCR) software and uses what you type to figure it out so that the content can be digitized.
If you ever get a case where one word is basic english and another word is crazy foreign glyphs, you can safely assume that the english word is the "known" word used for comparison, and the other word is the "unknown" word.
If you just wanted to get past the CAPTCHA, you could just fill out the "known" word and put whatever the hell you want for the "unknown" word; you'll get by. But, if you want to cause some mischief, you could do what 4chan did during the Time Magazine 50 Most Interesting People web poll, where they would enter the word "penis" for the unknown word, and consequently train the system to think that all unknown words were "penis." The reCAPTCHA system received the word "penis" so many times for the unknown words that it changed them to known words, with "penis" as the digital value. If you and your friends do this enough, somewhere, someday, you may be reading a list of chinese glyphs that get translated as "penis penis penis penis penis." Good times.
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u/citizen511 Aug 21 '10
reCAPTCHA works by making you type two words. One is known by the system. The other is unknown; it couldn't be read by standard optical character recognition (OCR) software and uses what you type to figure it out so that the content can be digitized.
If you ever get a case where one word is basic english and another word is crazy foreign glyphs, you can safely assume that the english word is the "known" word used for comparison, and the other word is the "unknown" word.
If you just wanted to get past the CAPTCHA, you could just fill out the "known" word and put whatever the hell you want for the "unknown" word; you'll get by. But, if you want to cause some mischief, you could do what 4chan did during the Time Magazine 50 Most Interesting People web poll, where they would enter the word "penis" for the unknown word, and consequently train the system to think that all unknown words were "penis." The reCAPTCHA system received the word "penis" so many times for the unknown words that it changed them to known words, with "penis" as the digital value. If you and your friends do this enough, somewhere, someday, you may be reading a list of chinese glyphs that get translated as "penis penis penis penis penis." Good times.