ReadWriteWeb

Solving CAPTCHAs - the text puzzles with distorted letters that many sites use to ensure that you are human - has become a daily reality for many Internet users. Sadly, these tests are often a major source of frustration, too. And while CAPTCHAs are used to provide a decent level of security for site owners, many of these systems have now been broken or are getting gamed by hackers who simply hire cheap workers to solve them manually. NuCaptcha, a Vancouver, B.C.-based company, aims to change all of this with a new video captcha system that launches today.

The BBC is looking to encode TV listing metadata and employ a compression algorithm to circumvent piracy, ad removal and illegal copying. According to a recent blog post by the EFF's Danny O'Brien, the group wants to get mandatory DRM onto digital TV receivers via a broadcast flag. In other words, a "public service broadcaster" wants to lessen the way we consume media by forcing manufacturers to limit product playing abilities. While open source TV services like Boxee allow users to view programs over home networks regardless of the device, a broadcast flag would force all HDTV receivers to include content protection. For those of us who watch our programs online, this could pose a serious problem.

Google just announced that it has acquired reCAPTCHA, one of the leading providers of CPATCHAs, the hard-to-read puzzles you often have to solve before you can sign up for a new web service. Google, of course, isn't so much interested in owning software that can generate CAPTCHAs - that's an easy problem to solve - but is looking at reCAPTCHA as a way to improve the optical character recognition (OCR) software it uses for large scale text scanning projects like Google Books and the Google News Archive Search.