Nearly a week after MySpace wrongly labeled Jessica Davis, shown here with her fiancé, a sex offender — mistaking her for a Jessica Davis in Utah, inset — no one from the social networking Web site has contacted her about the mistake.

Carnegie Mellon researchers have launched a new service that will not only protect e-mail addresses on the web from spambots, but also help digitize a backlog of old books, magazines, and newspapers so that they can eventually be computer searchable. The service, called reCAPTCHA, hopes to use the eyeballs of millions of Internet users to identify thousands of words for the Internet Archive.

The service repurposes technology from Completely Automated Public Turing Test to Tell Computers and Humans Apart (CAPTCHA)—a human-filtering method originally developed by Carnegie Mellon for Yahoo to prevent computers from registering bogus e-mail accounts. It’s something we’re all familiar with: any given site (such as Yahoo, Hotmail, PayPal, Joost, etc.) may present you with a box containing an image of distorted letters or words. You then have to type the letters accurately into a text box in order to proceed.

reCAPTCHA works the same way, except that it presents two words—one that the computer knows (a CAPTCHA), and one that it doesn’t (text that has stumped an optical character recognition—OCR —scanner for whatever reason). By using two CAPTCHAs together, the system is able to identify first that the user is human, and gain greater confidence that what the user entered for the OCR word is correct. If enough users solve the same OCR-generated word the same way, the system can then deduce that those people know what they’re talking about and digitize that word.

A Chinese Internet watchdog has accused 12 dating websites in Beijing of being a cover for prostitution and has ordered them to clean up their act, state media said Sunday.

“The outrageous pimping content in some websites is very shocking,” the Beijing Online News and Information Panel said in a statement, according to China’s Xinhua news agency.

One of the websites, ostensibly a lonely-hearts dating service, contained a posting supposedly from a young woman describing herself as a “professional pleasure giver,” Xinhua said.

The 12 sites are loaded with similar information, including “service items, pricing and contact information,” Xinhua quoted the statement as saying.

The online panel, which has representatives from government, academia and the public, has ordered a complete purge of such information from the sites by June 1.