Submission + - Putting Captcha's to good use.
Drewsk writes: "A story in CNN suggests that worldwide, we are wasting a total of 150,000 hours per day typing in the useless CAPTCHA's that webservers want in order to ensure we're humans and not robots. A new project underway, dubbed "reCAPTCHA" is an effort to put all that time to good use in much the same way that SETI likes to use our computer's spare time. In essence, all of the worlds books that are being scanned in to the Internet cannot all be read by OCR. Some have to be typed manually and others need passages clarified as words are unclear. The project wants to send those passages (words) out as Captcha's so we can all contribute to the world's online libraries... Read more."