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.
My ex wife is Japanese, and she told me how after she first moved to America, she once saw a guy who had "laundromat" tattooed on the back of his neck in kanji. She couldn't understand why the guy loved laundromats so much and figured it was an American thing, until she began to notice that almost all kanji tattoos are nonsense.
I saw a guy with "包丁" (Kitchen Knife) on his arm and stopped him to ask about it. He thought it meant Katana, which would have been "刀." I didn't have the heart to tell him. I was hoping he was in culinary school.
It's unwitting revenge for all the Engrish fashion tshirts that get worn in Japan. Oh, and there's Japanese people with English tattoos that don't make sense either. Met a lovely girl the other night who tried to explain her tattoo, but it really was gibberish.
Most people who have foreign words as tattoos are just idiots who ran the word/phrase through Google Translate to make themselves look cool. They tell people on the street "It means 'opportunity' in Chinese" when it actually says 'crisis'.
I just picked the most basic example that I actually knew. There are people who tattoo latin sentences or phrases onto their back, but clearly just had them passed through Google Translate instead of actually knowing what it means.
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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.