Word: captchas
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...useful that this card-carrying member of the "dinosaur media" is not going to take the bait. The HuffPosters capture all of the excitement of the blogosphere, enabling the would-be blogger to take a confident step online. It does a fine job of explaining blog vocabulary (CAPTCHA; commenter; troll; vlog), as well as various means of measuring traffic (hits, page views, unique visitors). Surprisingly, the book is congratulatory towards Arianna Huffington without taking a completely hagiographic tone. A must read for blog newbies, of which there are increasingly few. Ironically, the tech savvy reader could probably find much...
...Carnegie Mellon University. Somebody at Yahoo! had gone to them, complaining that criminals were taking advantage of Yahoo! Mail--they were using software to automatically create thousands of e-mail accounts very quickly, then using those accounts to send out spam. The Carnegie Mellon team came back with the CAPTCHA. (It stands for "completely automated public Turing test to tell computers and humans apart"; no, the acronym doesn't really fit.) The point of the CAPTCHA is that reading those swirly letters is something that computers aren't very good at. If you can read them, you're probably...
...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...
...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 and added to the archive. It's nice to know we humans are still good for something...