Spam Weapon Helps Preserve Books

A weapon used to fight spammers is now helping university researchers preserve old books and manuscripts. Carnegie Mellon is using a test to help decipher words in books that machines cannot read by letting sites use them to authenticate log-ins. The test, known as a CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Turing Test To Tell Computers and Humans Apart), was originally designed at Carnegie Mellon to help to keep out automated programs known as bots