What Is reCAPTCHA?
reCAPTCHA isn’t there to ruin anybody’s life — it is there to convert scanned books into legible text. It’s a project started by clever folk at Carnegie Mellon University which uses images of words from books rather than randomly generated nonsense words. It was purchased by Google in 2009 and, according to the website, is currently being used to digitize old editions of the New York Times and books from Google Books.