Web Security Words Help Digitize Old Books
August 14, 2008
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People who use the Internet to talk to friends, set up free e-mail accounts or buy concert tickets are often unknowingly helping to digitize vast libraries of old books and newspapers.
That’s because more than 40,000 Web sites — including popular ones such as Ticketmaster, Facebook and Craigslist — are using a new kind of security program called reCAPTCHA.
It’s the brainchild of Luis von Ahn, a computer scientist at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, who helped develop another commonly used Web security system. That one, called CAPTCHA, will allow people to access a Web site only if they prove they are human — and not a spammer’s computer — by typing in a sequence of letters or numbers that appear on the screen in a distorted or garbled image.
“Each time you type one of these, your brain is doing something amazing,” von Ahn says. “Your brain is performing a task that, despite 50 years of research in computer science, we cannot yet get computers to do.”
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Tags: reCAPTCHA