I will be in New York from Friday, April 2 to Saturday, April 10 and then in Boston until Sunday, April 18.
If you have any special suggestions on what I shouldn't miss there, please mail me or leave a comment. Or if you live there and happen to read this blog, I'm open to interesting meetings! Pointers to interesting happenings with interesting people, maybe some special events or just a good place to go Salsa dancing in Boston are mostly welcome.
Monika Henzinger, currently Director of Research at Google, is becoming (together with her husband) a Professor at the EPFL Lausanne (in english as pdf).
Congratulations to the Henzingers and Lausanne!
(See also Bertrand)
While I hate the objective, one has to admire the elegance and utter irony of this hack:
That's a big concern for Web portals such as Yahoo and Hotmail that offer free e-mail accounts. Software programs that automatically fill out registration forms can rapidly obtain thousands of e-mail addresses that can be used for sending spam e-mail. Telling the difference between legitimate human visitors and these software robots is a critical need.
The CAPTCHA tests are simple for humans to pass, but hard for computers. A typical test features a word with fuzzy or distorted letters, or words overlapping each other, or a word superimposed on a complex background; visitors to the site are asked to type a word they see. Yahoo began using the CAPTCHAs on its Web registration form several years ago; other Web sites quickly copied the idea.
But at least one potential spammer managed to crack the CAPTCHA test. Someone designed a software robot that would fill out a registration form and, when confronted with a CAPTCHA test, would post it on a free porn site. Visitors to the porn site would be asked to complete the test before they could view more pornography, and the software robot would use their answer to complete the e-mail registration.
The article offers more constructive utilizations of the basic of idea here, namely to trade some brain cycles on easy-for-humans-but-hard-for-computers for some small reward in a vastly distributed way.
You probably know the joke where an electrical engineer, a chemical engineer and a software engineer are together in a car. The car breaks down and while the electrical engineer starts checking all the cables and the chemical engineer theorizes about the gas composition, the software engineer suggests to just get out of the car, close all the doors, open them, get in and try again. 1)
Well, reality once again overtook fiction: Today's Mobiliy newsletter (Mobility is a car sharing company) has this gem to offer:
(translated from german)
What to do when nothing works
Sometimes it can happen, that a car can't be started. The following procedure proved to be helpful:
- Turn off ignition
- Remove key
- Get off
- Close doors
- Using your Mobility-Card, logout and re-login
- get in
- Insert key
- Ignite
Way to go...
1) Of course, a Microsoft engineer would also close and re-open all windows.
Yesterday, I had the opportunity to be DJ at afterworksalsa here in Bern. It was great fun, although I danced considerably less than I hoped to. Besides a few CDs, I mainly used my Powerbook as music repository.
Quite unexpectedly, I was online the whole time. Apparently someone has an public wireless hotspot near the place. In the middle of the evening someone requested a song I didn't have. No problem: I just downloaded that song in the background. Weird experience. And increased expectations for the next when I request a song :-)