Tuesday, May 29, 2007

Tool screens spam, digitizes books

A group of Carnegie Mellon University programmers have launched a service called ReCaptcha that can help <A HREF="http://news.zdnet.com/2100-1009_22-6186430.html?tag=nl.e550">cut down on spam while letting people digitize books.</A>

The project is a variation of the widely used "Captcha" technique to weed out computer abuse such as e-mailing spam or posting spam on blog comments. Captchas require users to pass little pattern recognition tests, commonly reading distorted or obscured words.

ReCaptcha turns this chore into a productive task by letting users digitize scanned images of words that computers couldn't figure out.

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