wavelinks

Official Google Blog: Teaching computers to read: Google acquires reCAPTCHA

The image above is a CAPTCHA — you can read it, but computers have a harder time interpreting the letters. We tried to make it hard for computers to recognize because we wanted to give humans the scoop first, but we’re happy to announce to everybody now that Google has acquired reCAPTCHA, a company that provides CAPTCHAs to help protect more than 100,000 websites from spam and fraud.

Since computers have trouble reading squiggly words like these, CAPTCHAs are designed to allow humans in but prevent malicious programs from scalping tickets or obtain millions of email accounts for spamming. But there’s a twist — the words in many of the CAPTCHAs provided by reCAPTCHA come from scanned archival newspapers and old books. Computers find it hard to recognize these words because the ink and paper have degraded over time, but by typing them in as a CAPTCHA, crowds teach computers to read the scanned text.

via Official Google Blog: Teaching computers to read: Google acquires reCAPTCHA.

Tags: captcha, fraud, Google, OCR, recaptcha, spam

Will Users Donate a Penny Per Email to Fight Spam, Yahoo Wonders | Epicenter | Wired.com

Yahoo’s researchers want you to voluntarily slap a one-cent stamp on your outgoing e-mails, with proceeds going to charity, in a bid to cut down on spam. Can doing good really do away with spam, which consumes 33 terawatt hours of electricity every year, not to mention way too much of our time?

The idea behind CentMail is that paying to send e-mail — even a single cent — differentiates a real e-mail from spam blasts, and thus, spam filters can be adjusted to let the stamped mail sail right through, according to a report from New Scientist. Users would get to choose which charity benefits from their penny missives, which the researchers hope will convince people to pay CentMail for something that’s currently free.

via Will Users Donate a Penny Per Email to Fight Spam, Yahoo Wonders | Epicenter | Wired.com.

Tags: CentMail, charity, email, Epicenter, spam, stamped, Wired, Yahoo