Reading a tech blog I frequent, I came across a post with a link to Amaazon's 'Artifical Artifical Intellegence' page, to use satalite images & real humans to help find Jim Gray.

The idea being that the lost Jim Gray's boat can be spotted in current satalite imagery by human eyes in the vast area around his last known location.

I hopped over to the site & began taking part, and after a few submittals I was included with a CAPTCHA, which is an image containing text that you have to manually type in the image. This method is generally used to verify a living human entity is entering the information onto a given web page.

There's nothing wrong with this, and to a degree this is appropriate. However I had a bit of a problem upon being presented with the CAPTCHA, as you can clearly see in this thumbnail (and can click on for the full screenshot):



As you can clearly see, the provided CAPTCHA is TOTALLY BLANK!!! That's right, apparently I was supposed to type NOTHING into the verification box, only that didn't quite take. After getting rejected due to this box being blank, and then trying to refresh hoping to get *something* on a subsequent reload, my account was 'haulted' for 5 minutes. Basically meaning my account was totally locked, and I could NOT take part in the online search.

Welp, that 5 minutes passed, and the page loaded back up and lo and behold, the problem is persisting. The given CAPTCHA is totally blank, and nothing I can do in my browser seems to show anything...

So overall this is deffinatly a great idea, but unfortuantly its obvously been poorly implemented.

[UPDATE]

Welp, i tdoes appear they fixed the CHAPTCHA issue, and they sent me an email confirming this.

I've been able to knock out around 200 or so images... I've been mainly focusing on the solid black images, as these represent areas outside of the photo zone. In essence they're a 'waste of time' so to speak so I'm trying to elliminate as many of thoes as possible. I figured these would have been automatically removed, but perhaps they didn't want to take the chance of elliminating a low data image that may have been a hit in addition to the zero data images...

It feels good to be helping but the closer it gets to 0 without having any positive matches, at least that I found, it seems perhaps something more tragic could have happened... But in all there's only 1 photo being looked for, excluding any images of other possible boats in the area (which is probably close to, if not, zero).

But even if there was the slimmest of chances, it was worth every second spent looking at images of nothing...