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.

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.