News

Post-Gazette reports that a growing number of advice in chat rooms is generated by bots. Use of bots to register for email addresses, that are later used for spam, has grown to become a noticable nuisance.

Manuel Blum's team at CMU has come up with a solution to the problem, that has been implemented by Yahoo last month. When computer users try to register with Yahoo, they must pass a test to verify that they are human, not a robot.

The test is administered by a computer program and is called "Captcha," a "gotcha"-inspired acronym that means Completely Automatic Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart.

One Captcha test is based on understanding distorted words in an image; another is based on understanding spoken numbers combined with strong noise;

See the test for yourself and check how human you are at www.captcha.net

See full story at http://www.postgazette.com/healthscience/20011021blumside1021p4.asp