New web security system tests computers' emotions Sorting the
men from the replicants. A new Captcha system seeks to separate
humans from computers by testing empathy – and spreading
awareness of human rights human rights abuses at the same time.
A Captcha – which stands for Completely Automated Public Turing
test to tell Computers and Humans Apart – is the test used when
logging into many sites to distinguish between real people and
malicious programs, which may attempt to log into many thousands
of accounts at the same time. You've all used one – signing up
for a New Statesman commenting account, if nowhere else – and
they are ripe for being put to good use. ReCAPTCHA was the first
socially-beneficial captcha, and still the most popular. It uses
the combined might of all the human brain power wasted on
Captchas to transcribe scanned books: 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 speci