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.

So while our computers cannot talk to us, cannot think, or act as an intelligent being, they do in many ways act at least semi-intelligent. Consider the web-spider. Not a true spider, by any means, but rather a computer program designed to browse the internet and identify key pages and even phrases.

While androids cannot talk, or even walk, you might be able to make a case that they can read the news. Depends what you mean by read really. As spiders become more advanced, they are becoming increasingly useful, and increasingly dangerous. Their powerful search capability, designed for good, can also be used for evil. Or simply to annoy.

Computer programs can now be taught to not merely search the internet, but also to use forms and interact with webpages. Everyone who runs a website wants visitors, but if you are running an online business you don't just want visitors- you need them.

Having a horde of robots coming through the site will be of no benefit, and can even hurt, especially if the robots are controlled by spammers. If you run a site such as a blog or a forum, it is especially important that you only allow humans to enter. While you can place tags on your site to deny robots access, and many robots will follow these, it is not these that are the problem. You need some way of blocking access unless the one entering can prove they are human.

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.

This, of course, does not answer the title question... or does it? An essential part of the news is the images that go along with the text, so without the ability to understand a picture, I have to say that no, no computer can really read the news, no matter how easy it is to access newspapers online.