Pretty cool use of tech serving multiple functions at once.

(Image is in the Public Domain)

Not long ago, we learned that CAPTCHAs were being broken by people using pornography to motivate live humans to enter code after code. While very annoying, it was a very clever way of defeating the CAPTCHAs and made spammers day.

Now we see another brilliant use of CAPTCHAs in the restoration of old text too obscured for machines to read

A team of computer scientists has taken a common Internet tool for screening out spam and adapted it to help convert text from old books and manuscripts into electronic files. The effort might not put professional transcribers out of business, but it could cut the cost of creating digital libraries After a year of operation, reCAPTCHA has helped resolve about 440 million words for client users that are digitizing newspaper and document archives; von Ahn says his team just completed the entire 1908 archive from The New York Times, for example.

This is a very clever use of what would normally be wasted time similar to the idea of distributed computing as in the SETI@home project.

You might not know who's watching

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It's important to know that in this case, the spy had physical access to the machine and there was a light that came on to tell the victim that the webcam was active. However, you should always be careful if you have a webcam installed to cover or turn it when not in use.

(Image used under: Creative Commons 2.0 [SRC])

In the mad rush to create a value-adding product at the expense of privacy (wow, where have we heard that before?), Google execs failed to consider that they too might be on the losing end of Google Streetview. A privacy group has just released a ton of personal information that could cause all kinds of problems for Google exec Larry Page. The key is that the information was gathered only from Google Streetview and in about 30 minutes.

Hopefully it will lead to positive changes to the service, but it's far more likely to lead to an obscuring of just the Google execs' data.

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As with most new search engines, it's not that impressive out of the box. It doesn't seem to return much in the way of more relevant results than any other page, but the makers of Cuil (pronounced COOL) are saying that they index more pages than any other search engine. Because their algorithms analyze the content of the pages and categorize that way, in theory, they should return better results.

Their advantages are a clean, simple interface (like Google), but unlike Google, they don't keep logs and records of your searches to track you. As this is my only real complaint against Google, if they could just do as well as Google with the search results, but have better privacy, then perhaps Google's time is done.

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Download a copy of Firefox 3 this Tuesday the 17th. Send a message that we're tired of big-company products that aren't stable, aren't standard, aren't secure, and can't be customized.

Prefer to stay hidden?

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A commenter pointed out this checklist of tips for controlling your data and your privacy and I agree that it's got some good advice so here's the link. Most of all, I credit them for being one of the first articles I've found online about ID theft that actually mentions credit freezes (other than mine of course).

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After my blog radio interview this last Thursday, the interviewer, who's also a writer for Blogcritic Magazine, posted a transcript on their webpage here.

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Today there was a talk about Cyberbullying that revealed some really fascinating information. Elizabeth Englander from MARC (the Massachusetts Aggression Reduction Center) game a very spirited talk with some good statistics from her group's studies.

• Grappling is the name for either staging a fight or ambushing someone and recording it to upload to Youtube later. There has been at least one suicide as a result of these attacks where a girl was attacked, stripped, and violated with the entire episode uploaded to Youtube.
• When asked what the motivation was for being a cyberbully, kids (ranging from middleschool to college) listed mostly either "because it was fun" or "because I was angry". The most interesting thing about this statistic is that it broke down almost perfectly along gender lines. Can you guess which is which? Boys did it for fun and girls because they were angry.
• There's at least one school district where the teachers have threatened to strike unless they are allowed to collect cellphones at the door. This comes out of situations like the one where the students provoked their teacher on purpose and recorded his angy reaction for upload to Youtube.

Another very interesting thing that Elizabeth said due to a question about the effectiveness of Public Service Announcements about cyberbullying was that, in her state at least, they held a contest for teens to create public service announcements that would get the message out to people of their own age. That's brilliant! As the commenter in the audience said, the "This is your brain on drugs" and "I learned it by watching you" PSAs from our youth were really more of a joke than anything. Teens are probably best equipped to create something that their peers will pay attention to.

You can find out more about MARC at their website.

We all like our laptops

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Today before the first panel at the conference, I heard a presenter who had to be in his 70's or close to it say, "I feel so naked without my laptop".

And that has been today's CFP conference highlight 🙂

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If there was a disadvantage to Firefox, it would be stability and memory. Those have apparently been fixed in version 3 (due out in June), but one of the most exciting features will be Firefox's brand new speed advantage.

Mozilla VP of engineering Mike Schroepfer claims that Firefox 3 is 9.3x faster than Microsoft Internet Explorer 7 and 2.7x faster than Firefox 2 in terms of JavaScript performance. In terms of Gmail message load time, he claims Firefox 3 is 6.8x faster than IE7 and 3.8x faster than Firefox 2. And he says Firefox 3 beats Apple's Safari, which is also faster than Firefox 2.