Wild Winds of Fortune -- for those who don't have the feed

[pat]

Four posts:

From last week, about saying we're sorry to the world.

From today:
Leiberman concedes in Connecticut
A Letter to Barbara Boxer
CAPTCHAs: How I hate em, and why they're necessary

[Edit: it occurs to me I never actually mentioned this post, either, I don't think, about the outcome of the Yates trial.]

Comments

[phinnia.livejournal.com]

Well, at least they have an audio version. (Which is actually more secure, because it's harder to hack a .wav file than an image, even aside from my personal feelings on the matter of audio captchas.)

[patgreene.livejournal.com]

Are audio captchas a problem? I guess I was not paying attention.

[phinnia.livejournal.com]

Well, their lack of existence is a problem. :-) But if you have a problem with the visual ones, often the audio ones are surprisingly usable (I just clicked the one for Blogger and it's reasonably clear, much more so than the letters.)

[princeofwands.livejournal.com]

We've been talking a lot about usability issues around CAPTCHAs lately.

I'd seen this link to libraries including drop-in audio based CAPTCHAs:
http://www.ejeliot.com/pages/2

And here's one for an "image recognition" based CAPTCHA
http://www.realtechnews.com/posts/2913

The research we discussed says that image based ones (rather than text) have a faster human-response rate than text based ones, are significantly easier for humans, and significantly hard for computer based attacks to defeat.

Interesting, yeah?

Sadly, it led almost immediately to this perversion:
http://www.hotcaptcha.com/

[phinnia.livejournal.com]

Nifty. :-) Thank you for sharing those. :-D