Google buys CAPTCHA firm

Google has acquired ReCAPTCHA, makers of technology that creates those squiggly characters -- mostly lifted from scanning old newspapers and books -- that are used to distinguish between human web users and bots, the search giant announced Thursday. ReCAPTCHA, a company that emerged out of the incubator program at Carnegie Mellon University's computer science department, currently serves about 100,000 websites, protecting them from spam and fraud. Google also plans to use the technology to improve its book and newspaper scanning projects. — DK