There’s nothing we love more than warped words (or random
numbers and letters) we have to type in before we’re allowed to
comment. These CAPTCHAs cut down on spam (and, sometimes,
legitimate comments. grrr.)—and every once in a while, someone
comes along with a great idea to make that kind of technology
useful, like reCAPTCHA using words scanned from old texts that
OCR software can’t recognize. A great idea, right? It’s so
popular more than 100,000 websites have signed up to use the
specialized CAPTCHAs, including Facebook and craigslist. I’m
sure you can guess how this story ends: Google buys reCAPTCHA.
This is doubly beneficial for Google: - They get cooler CAPTCHAs
than the random strings of letters they’ve been using on Blogger
and other services. - They get free help decipher unintelligible
words in their Google Books, Google News Archive and other
scanning projects Of course, there’s one little problem on this
cool feature—if the computer couldn’t recognize the word in the
first place, how will it know