The Latest in IT Security

Google has cracked the CAPTCHA. In a paper published this week, Google researchers say that theyve developed an algorithm that can accurately solve Googles own CAPTCHA puzzles — those obfuscated jumbles of letters and numbers you type in on websites to prove that youre human — with 99.8 percent accuracy, obviously posing something of a problem to the puzzles intended purpose of weeding out robots. The new system was developed to help Google automatically analyze hard-to-read signs and house numbers photographed by its Street View cameras, allowing it to accurately match images with locations on a map. Google is, of course, specially suited to developing such advanced automated text analysis because of its extensive work with Street View and reCAPTCHA, its own CAPTCHA service.