On Ticket Master this is called the security check. This is from their site:
The Security Check allows us to:
Ensure Fair Access to Tickets
Automated programs known as “Bots” cannot read distorted text as well as humans. The Security Check helps prevent automated programs from blocking other customers from getting tickets.
Digitize Books One Word at a Time
By entering the words in the box, you are also helping to digitize books from the Internet Archive and preserve literature that was written before the computer age.
Provide an Audio Option for Visually Impaired Customers
An audio option allows visually impaired customers to hear a set of 8 digits that can be entered instead of the word challenge.
When this first started the “words” you had to type were actually words. They were also in a straight line. They were also one color — black. Now it seems anything goes. As you can see from a couple of these examples. The phrase is in a wave. Part of it is black another part white. A large part of the time they aren’t even words. One thing I’ve noticed lately is some of the phrases have accent marks. How do you recreate an accent mark on a standard American key board?
Sometimes it takes me a couple of times to figure out what the phrase is. When getting tickets this can be a pain.
The thing I didn’t know was the part about helping to digitize books one word at a time.
This from the Recapthcha site:
About 200 million CAPTCHAs are solved by humans around the world every day. In each case, roughly ten seconds of human time are being spent. Individually, that’s not a lot of time, but in aggregate these little puzzles consume more than 150,000 hours of work each day. What if we could make positive use of this human effort? reCAPTCHA does exactly that by channeling the effort spent solving CAPTCHAs online into “reading” books.
To archive human knowledge and to make information more accessible to the world, multiple projects are currently digitizing physical books that were written before the computer age. The book pages are being photographically scanned, and then transformed into text using “Optical Character Recognition” (OCR). The transformation into text is useful because scanning a book produces images, which are difficult to store on small devices, expensive to download, and cannot be searched. The problem is that OCR is not perfect.
reCAPTCHA improves the process of digitizing books by sending words that cannot be read by computers to the Web in the form of CAPTCHAs for humans to decipher. More specifically, each word that cannot be read correctly by OCR is placed on an image and used as a CAPTCHA. This is possible because most OCR programs alert you when a word cannot be read correctly.
But if a computer can’t read such a CAPTCHA, how does the system know the correct answer to the puzzle? Here’s how: Each new word that cannot be read correctly by OCR is given to a user in conjunction with another word for which the answer is already known. The user is then asked to read both words. If they solve the one for which the answer is known, the system assumes their answer is correct for the new one. The system then gives the new image to a number of other people to determine, with higher confidence, whether the original answer was correct.
Who knew?
So I guess I’ll be a little less annoyed each time I have to type in those phrases.
But it would be so much easier if they were actual words
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