The Time article generally reads like an idiots guide to the Captcha, there was an interesting point in the last paragraph that caught my eye. The Internet archive as part of their book scanning project collects a register of words that the OCR process cannot recognise. It farms those out to sites that need captchas. The owners of those sites do a translation for the archive and then use it on their site for their own turing test purposes.
This is a great example of business needs merging. The Internet Archive needs people to translate the words that the OCR can’t. By farming these out to many of the sites that need to prove their potential users are human they get the benefit of eyes they cannot afford to hire. The sites then get use of an image that can be used as a Captcha, one that they know sophisticated OCR was unable to decode. Everyone wins. One of the great benefits of the Internet is how it eases the connections between peoples needs.
And a trip to the Internet Archive is always a good idea.