Category: Obsessions

November 22, 2005 /

I think the killer app for Mechanical Turk is already out there. Think about it: what’s very simple for a human, very hard for a computer, shows up everywhere and acts as a gatekeeper from potentially greater value?

That’s right: those little “verify you’re a human” image boxes that make you transcribe a series of bendy, obscured letters and numbers in order to leave a Blogger comment, or get an LJ account or a GMail address. (Less awkwardly, more annoyingly, they’re called CAPTCHAs.) Yoz Grahame pointed out like a year ago that these are a solved problem: you just go to a CAPTCHA page, grab the image, and put it in front of porn on one of your other sites. Step three: profit!

The only problem with that scenario is that, well, there are ways to get porn without all that tiresome thinking, and most porn-seekers will take them over your time-consuming verification step. It’s easier to type BRITTNAY SPEER NUDE into Google Image Search than it is to decipher Ty$23YiD.

But if MT’s model works (and I’m not saying it does; right now only Amazon uses it, and you’d have to work hard and boringly to make five bucks an hour), and if it gets sufficiently popular that the site’s admins won’t notice spammers slipping CAPTCHAS in, this could be a viable crack. Sign up for an account, pay Random Human two cents to verify it, and spam, spam away. It’s okay, say the servers you’re using to link your herbal V1agra incest mortgage. I know that’s not a bot!

CAPTCHAs are the least bad solution to bot-signups out there right now, but I hope the tech startups that are built around providing that kind of authentication don’t get comfortable. They’ve never been more than a stopgap.

The second time I’ve ever linked Slashdot. Via Downhill Battle.

November 17, 2005 /

Okay, so DC beat me to posting about Sony’s big fat recall, but now I’m scooping him: the rootkit contained GPLed de-DRMS code by DVD Jon! I know that makes no sense. Give me a second.

“DVD” Jon Johansen is a Norwegian hacker who likes to take things like DVD encryption and Apple’s iTunes digital rights management (DRM) software and meet them in a steel cage (and win). He releases the software he writes under an open-source license called the GPL, a legally binding agreement that says “hey, you can freely look at and reuse this source code, but only if you release code derived from it under the same license.” Like the Creative Commons license I use, the GPL is just working within existing copyright law.

Now, the XCP software that’s causing such a fuss–because it installs itself on your computer without your consent when you pop in a Sony music CD, is very difficult to find or remove, deprives you of your fair use rights and makes you vulnerable to a whole new brand of virus–needs a way to interact with the CD-ripping functionality of Apple’s iTunes. iTunes creates AAC files when it rips a CD, which are locked to specific authorized computers (although some of those restrictions may be lifted for ripping–I’m not sure, as I haven’t used it to rip CDs myself). XCP doesn’t want you to authorize any other computers to use the copies you make, though. It doesn’t want those copies to leave the ripping computer ever, at all. So the people who wrote it used DVD Jon’s open-source code for messing with iTunes DRM to make that happen.

In doing so, they created derivative software and kept it closed-source. They did not release it under GPL, violating the terms of the license under which they obtained the code. And they sold it millions of times over.

Here’s the point: this is a massive act of copyright infringement and piracy, on the same scale as the giant duplication rings of Southeast Asia that record labels and movie studios have been trying to stomp out for decades. First4Internet Software, which developed the technology to “stop piracy,” is one of the single biggest software pirates on the planet. Sony BMG paid them millions to be so, and distributed the results.

The Slashdot post I linked above says this comes from the “when-will-it-end dept.” This story is amazing. If we had plotted a fantasy scenario to bring down a record label, we probably couldn’t have come up with anything this good.

I fully expect you to correct this, interweb

November 17, 2005 /

I’ve tried and tried, but I cannot find a way to be cynical about the $100 laptop initiative.

Update 1348 hrs: But the interweb can, in “Problems with the $100 laptop” and the reaction from MetaFilter (both via Henry McEuen).

The arguments in the Fonly paper don’t change my stance, though. High saturation would lead to a pretty pathetic gray market, especially when you can eBay an old Compaq laptop (but not a million) for twelve bucks. And no, the requirements haven’t been met yet, and we don’t know what the consequences will be. Of course we don’t know what the consequences will be. That’s called the Law of Unintended Consequences. But we know what the consequences of broadening gaps in education and communication will be, and in this case I’m eager to let the proverbial street find its own uses.

November 16, 2005 /

Cool constrained-writing idea: Two Lines, Two Stories, One Day, where two guys trade first sentences and then have to write the rest of a short story. Some of the sentences are great! The stories themselves tend to lean a little hard on sting endings, but they’re still fun.

If you don’t already wish you were a baller then I bet you wish you did.

November 8, 2005 /

Basketball tonight is TURKEY DINNER FROM HELL! Night. We are making a turkey and all the fixings. Do not attempt to remind us that literally weeks remain before Thanksgiving. Your Earth time cannot hold the turkey. FROM HELL!

Speaking of conspiracies, we are going to go see HARRY POTTER ON THE DAMN IMAX and you should come with us. The November 18 2330 hrs (Stonybrook) show, to which a few of us have tickets, appears to have already sold out. I’m going to go out on a limb here, however, and say that my girlfriend might want to see it more than once. I’ll post the second showtime when I know it.

October 13, 2005 /

There’s a woman who works in my building whose name I don’t want to type exactly, for fear of Google, but which is pronounced “Ah NET tuh.” Short E. Her last name is Doss.

A few minutes ago, I heard over the building intercom: “Anita Doss, please dial zero… Anita Doss, please dial zero.”

A couple minutes later, this time in an impatient tone: “Anita Doss, please dial zero… REPEAT, Anita Doss, please dial zero.”

Five minutes pass. Then, sounding harrassed: “Anita DESS, please dial zero…”

October 13, 2005 /

When I put on Facebook that my music preference was “whatever you liked two years ago,” I wasn’t kidding. I finally bothered to count this morning and noticed that “Hey Ya” is in 22/24 time. And I’m getting really into the original Extraordinary Machine, the unreleased Fiona Apple album that leaked onto the interweb and got everybody all hot and bothered in 2003. Now the album has been retooled and actually released, and I’m just starting to listen to the stuff I ripped off Maria’s pirated CD that she got from Graham.

Expect a lot of stories that sound like Fiona Apple in a week or so, when I cycle through my current buffer. The buffer is why yesterday’s and next Wednesday’s stories are about outer space, because last week I was getting really into Firefly (on which I was a little behind–it came out in 2002).

In other stuff about music, I can’t stand Harvey Danger, so I’m upset that I have to buy their album. Values versus taste! Does anybody want a Harvey Danger album for a Christmas present?