Google has acquired ReCaptcha, a company that provides visual security codes for protecting more than million websites from spam and fraud.
In its official blog, Google said that the acquisition was intended to use ReCaptcha's technology as a security measure in Google entities. Apart from that, ReCaptcha's expertise will also be used for optical character recognition technique for their book-scanning project.
ReCaptcha is a company from Carnegie Mellon University's School of Computer Science that works towards twisting two words in order to confuse spam bots and scripts from spamming websites. ReCaptcha uses anOCR software that can read passages from news clips, old books and articles which make Google much interested. Hackers use the same software to get through CAPTCHAs.
However, the ReCaptcha software itself isn't perfect and a hacker group dubbed Anonymous had used brute forcing/guessing algorithm to crack it.
Currently, ReCaptcha is helping in digitization of old New York Times issues, which is what apparently got Google interested.
