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...source of generational discord is pornography. Schwarzer initiated the PorNo campaign in 1987 to fight for a ban on porn. Roche, by contrast, says "I get a lot out of good porn," and calls traditional feminism "joyless." Somewhere in the middle stands Ariadne von Schirach, author of the book Der Tanz um die Lust (The Dance Around Lust), who decries "the pornographization of society" and wants to free female sexuality from the pressures of a world where easily consumable porn is supplanting eroticism. "I'm not against pornography," says Von Schirach. "I'm against people selling butter or cell phones...
...says that the women's movement was put on hold for years while Germany concentrated on the challenges of unification. "Gender studies were being taught at university," adds Meredith Haaf, one of the authors of Alphagirls, "but that was all very theoretical." That ideological interlude is now over. Ursula von der Leyen, Family Minister in Angela Merkel's coalition government, has initiated reforms aimed at getting fathers to take parental leave, and expanding child-care services. With women's rights before a broader German public, Roche's book appeared at a good time. Now the question is whether her frank...
...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...