Word: ahn
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...CAPTCHA caught on, and now it's all over the Web. Luis von Ahn, an assistant professor at Carnegie Mellon who was part of the original CAPTCHA team, estimates that people fill out close to 200 million CAPTCHAS a day. But you should pause when you see one--it's one of the rare moments when the invisible war being waged between spammers and programmers becomes visible to you, the prey. "Of course," says Von Ahn, "this has been a little bit of an arms race with spammers, because now there's a huge incentive for spammers...
...also get around CAPTCHAS by being clever. They work only because there are things computers can't do, and there are fewer and fewer of those things all the time. Headlines on tech blogs regularly announce the cracking of CAPTCHAS--Gmail's, Hotmail's, Yahoo!'s. Von Ahn doubts the headlines are true--and companies aren't eager to confirm this kind of rumor--but it's possible for an amateur, poorly conceived CAPTCHA to be hacked. (He gives an example: a CAPTCHA in which each letter was always formed out of the same number of pixels. All the malware...
...faster that software evolves, and the harder it gets to distinguish between people and computers, the faster CAPTCHAS have to change. They might soon involve identifying animals or listening to a sound file--anything computers aren't good at. (What's next? Tasting wine? Composing a sonnet?) Von Ahn is confident that the good guys are still ahead for now, but the point at which software can reliably read CAPTCHAS is probably as few as three to five years away...
...meantime, Von Ahn has figured out a way to take advantage of all the spare brainpower hundreds of millions of people expend deciphering wiggly letters. He has teamed up with the Internet Archive, a San Francisco nonprofit that uses computers to digitally scan books and put the text online, where it can be accessed for free. When its scanners find a word they can't read, they automatically turn it into a CAPTCHA that gets exported to a website in need of one. A human reads it and transcribes it, and the results get sent back to the scanner...
...took gold at the Northeast Regional competition. While only qualifying 10 of a possible 12 fencers gave Harvard almost no chance at winning, the squad managed to beat out numerous other schools for sixth behind All-American performances from saberists senior Alexa Weingarden, freshman Alexandra Sneider, and senior Steve Ahn, as well as senior epeeist Teddy Sherrill. “Going into NCAAs, a lot of the pressure was off for the end of the season,” Parker said. “I think people just went, had a lot of fun, worked really hard, and wanted...