Hate those Captchas? Try cats and dogs

Captchas are an idea whose time has come. As soon as new ways of disguising words are found, so are new ways of cracking the code. It seems that words that can be deciphered by humans are also (and quite unfortunately) decipherable by silicon chips known as computers.

Fortunately, the world of technology and security is always full of innovation. The folks at Microsoft Research have developed a new kind of Captcha that does not use a single word. In fact, it uses two common household pets, cats and dogs. According to their website:

Asirra (Animal Species Image Recognition for Restricting Access) is a HIP that works by asking users to identify photographs of cats and dogs. This task is difficult for computers, but our user studies have shown that people can accomplish it quickly and accurately. Many even think it’s fun!

Furthermore, the images are selected randomly from a HUGE database of cats and dogs up for adoption at Petfinder.com. In fact, on every image, there is a link to the pet on Petfinder.com, and if you find a pet that you like, you can adopt it. How cool is that?

One of the disadvantages of this system is that it takes considerably more time than a word Captcha. But it is a very effective way of blocking out spambots and automatic account creation.

Why 404?

I’m sure most of you have clicked on a link, only to discover something like this:

Sometimes, you may have wondered, “What does that 404 stand for? And why?”

Home away from home

Hey guys,

I’m currently NOT at home in Seattle right now. In fact, I’m going to be in Yakima over the weekend.

The Internet connection at the Howard Johnson is absolutely abominable, so there won’t be many new media-rich and exciting blog posts. Sorry about that, blame HoJo for putting happy balls on their WiFi antennas.

Till I get back!

–Deathgleaner

An update on SOPA/PIPA

See my last post about these two bills: SOPA (and PIPA): What they mean for your Internet.

Since my last post, I’ve gotten numerous emails from Demand Progress and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, thanking me for my opposition against the bills, and ironically, asking me to sign more petitions. It turns out that the activism on the Internet has pushed these bills to the “ropes,” as Demand Progress claims. Now, they’re asking me to push Obama to veto the bills. “President Obama has expressed concerns about the bills, but hasn’t pledged to veto them,” the organization claims.

SOPA (and PIPA): What they mean for your Internet

I hadn’t heard of the Stop Online Privacy Act (SOPA) or the Preventing Real Online Threats to Economic Creativity and Theft of Intellectual Property Act (Protect-IP Act or PIPA) until an email from Demand Progress showed up in my inbox. Since I hadn’t received any politicking emails in a long time, I became interested when I read that the PIPA and SOPA would ruin the Internet as we know it.

As with all emails concerning political issues, I took the opinions with a grain of salt. Are those two aforementioned acts as bad as Demand Progress portrays them? To find out, I started doing some personal research. Here’s what I found out:

Reblog: How to name a web browser

This post was originally written by thebeebs on blogs.msdn.net, on 9 January 2012. You can read the original post here.

How to name a web browser (by those who have)

I don’t know about you, but my web browser is the second app I launch every day (just after email). In fact, overall, I probably spend more time using it than pretty much anything else (not surprising considering what I do). But it got me wondering, where do the different browser names come from? So I did some digging.

Getting rid of the cobwebs

Over the span of four years, my bookmarks have become VERY cluttered. Like that picture on the left, my bookmarks were all haphazardly stuffed into one bulging folder. Luckily, I had the URLs and website names of my favorite websites memorized, but when time came to make use of a site that I had cached away in my bookmarks, it was nearly impossible to do so. Even with the search features of Firefox, the sheer amount of bookmarks hurt my eyes.

Breadfish

This here, has got to be the most awesome internet song ever. Click on the picture and you’ll see why.

Why browser speed tests fail

We’ve all heard of browser speed tests that claim different things: “Firefox is the fastest”, “Safari crushes the competition”, “Google Chrome is faster than a potato”, whatever. The truth is, none of these browsers is faster than the other, save for IE, which sucks. Why?