Artificial intelligence has become much more advanced in recent years then anyone imagined it would, and yet we remain, seemingly, as far from the real of the truly intelligent android as ever. Undoubtedly Isaac Asimov would be impressed with what we have managed to accomplish; much of it according to his predictions, yet there are still no conscious machines or positronic brains.

Still, although our computers hardly act with intelligence and can certainly not think, there are still thinking elements that occasionally appear. For example, look at the web spider. Obviously not a real spider, I mean the automated little programs that can surf the web almost as well as a human can. Designed to browse the internet and pick out specific key phrases, or pages, they can act fairly intelligently in this particular area.

Although our computers remain unable to communicate through speech, and are physically very different from us, you could well argue that they are still able to read the news. As the internet grows, web spiders and surfing robots become ever more common, especially as the amount of data available make it more important then ever that we find some way to manage it and find what we are looking for.

Programs and scripts can be taught not only to search the web, but also to interact with it. Everyone who has a webpage wants people to visit, but for those running an online business it is not just that they want people, but that they need people.

Particularly with sites such as forums or blogs, a huge volume of robots is a very bad thing. It is easy for a spammer to create a program that will log onto hundreds of forums, and post thousands of annoying messages. This is why it is vital that only humans can use the forms you provide. You can add little tags to your pages to ban robots, but of course, the robots you are worried about are hardly going to pay attention to this. So you need to find some way of preventing anyone who isn't human from accessing your site.

The answer to this is the one thing that a human can do easily, but no robot ever could Optical recognition. Computers cannot read a picture, so if you simply ask the visitor to copy some text from a small picture into a box, then you will immediately block the robots from entering. This is known as CAPTCHA, and is becoming extremely common, precisely because it is so effective.

All you have to do is install a simple program onto your website, and it will produce a small image with altered text. The visitor has to type that text into a box before they can log in, or otherwise interact with a form. This will block any robots from using it, as the robot will not be able to read the text.

In answer to the title, can a computer read the news? Yes, they can, as long as there is no CATCHA blocking their path. On the other hand, it will be quite a while yet before any computer can understand the news, as they are pretty far from being intelligent.