Word: yahoo
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Pity the remaining inhabitants of Yahoo! On August 1, when its board of directors meets to decide whether to throw out CEO and co-founder Jerry Yang and capitulate to Microsoft, the Siege of Yahoo will have entered, to the day, its sixth month...
...smartest move Gates could make right now is to get out of the way. (Steve Ballmer should, too; pursuing Yahoo is a pretty good hint that his master plan for the Web is, like Gates's was, to try to buy Microsoft's way into the game.) There are many smart and talented people inside Microsoft who know what to do. (Blow up Vista and abandon its next iteration, Windows 7, and start from scratch, is but one excellent idea...
This electronic hoop you have to jump through was invented in 2000 by a team of programmers at 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...
...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...
...just returned to Palo Alto, Calif., from a major tech-industry event near San Diego. There he had been grilled yet again on whether he'd sell Facebook to Microsoft, whose minority investment gave Facebook a $15 billion valuation. (Microsoft, which tried and failed to buy Yahoo!, could use a new platform itself.) Yet again Zuckerberg said no, he's not selling out - he's just trying to build a great and viable platform and that takes time. Zuckerberg speaks in a steady, mellifluous tenor; he has a long neck and tends to point his chin upward, as if aiming...