Spam weapon helps preserve books By Paul Rubens A weapon used to fight spammers is now helping university researchers preserve old books and manuscripts.
...Bots are designed by spammers to post advertisements in discussion forums or to sign up for large numbers of e-mail addresses which are later used to send spam messages. A CAPTCHA consists of an image containing letters or numbers which have been heavily distorted, making it hard or impossible for a bot to "read." There are still about 100 million books to be digitised, which at the current rate will take us about 400 years to complete Luis von Ahn, Carnegie Mellon By requiring web site visitors to type in the contents of the CAPTCHA before being allowed in to the site, humans can be admitted while all but the smartest bots are rebuffed. CAPTCHAs are unpopular with many Internet users because the words they contain are often so heavily distorted to foil bots that that many humans struggle to read them. This means potential visitors' time is wasted while they make repeated attempts to decipher the CAPTCHA they are presented with. But the CMU research team, based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, has devised an ingenious system to put the time used interpreting CAPTCHAs to good use. Full article at: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7023627.stm _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.isoc-ny.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
