Google has announced on its official blog that it will purchase reCAPTCHA, the company famous for generating those hard-to-read anti-spam filters on every signup page you visit.
Google isn't just interested in the company for its security cred. As Google explains, reCAPTCHA gets all those security words by scanning old, degraded documents and newspapers--something that Google is also hard at work on, for their ever-controversial Google Books project. "So we'll be applying the technology within Google not only to increase fraud and spam protection for Google products but also to improve our books and newspaper scanning process," the announcement reads.
ReCAPTCHA was originally developed at Carnegie Mellon University to help digitize books, and was later used to prevent malicious bot-ware from accessing sensitive sites. The company is also digitizing the archives of the New York Times, which it should finish next year.
Related Stories: | Topics:Innovation, Technology, google, spam, recaptcha, security, scanning, New York Times, , Google Inc., Computer Technology, Science and Technology, Technology, Computer Security |
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Recent Comments | 2 Total
September 16, 2009 at 2:01pm by Software Developer
Captchas have been used for a while and still remain a good way to cut down on the volume of spam. There are still ones that make it through but ultimately "flags" and moderation by users and administrators can flag the rest.
September 17, 2009 at 1:58am by Robert Wetzlmayr
ItÄS always amazing how Google manages to find yet another twist in their ongoing efforts to get all of us into their bee-hive. We all are mechanical turks now.
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Robert (http://wetzlmayr.com/)