External Brain

The biggest issue with audio CAPTCHA is actually the same as with the visual version: just as it’s often hard to see which individual letters are being used, it’s hard to distinguish individual sounds. One of the problems with audio CAPTCHA that I’ve found is similar to the visual CAPTCHA: there’s so much noise behind the words that are being spoken you can’t identify what they are, Hawkins said.

That noise is added to block automated recognition systems, but in this case the cure seems worse than the problem. I pride myself on being a pretty good listener, Hawkins said. Because I’m blind I need to use my hearing in different ways and I find even with that very acute hearing that these audio CAPTCHAs are really difficult to understand.

A secondary problem is that audio CAPTCHAs often use numbers, but doesn’t distinguish them, so it’s impossible to know if you have to type 1 or one or won.

The solution, as we said yesterday, is to ditch CAPTCHA altogether. Sending a verification email is one solution, though that adds an extra step. Another good alternative is asking site users to solve a simple maths problem — an option that works well with screen readers, Hawkins said — via Lifehacker Australia

Back in distant, halcyon 2010, I was asked to write something about Wikileaks and its Cablegate scandal. So, I wrote a rather melancholy essay about how things seemed to me to be going — dreadfully, painfully, like some leaden and ancient Greek tragedy.

In that 2010 essay, I surmised that things were going to get worse before they got any better. Sure enough, things now are lots, lots worse. Much worse than Cablegate ever was.

Cablegate merely kicked the kneecap of the archaic and semi-useless US State Department. But Edward Snowden just strolled out of the Moscow airport, with his Wikileaks personal escort, one month after ripping the pants off the National Security Agency.

You see, as it happens, a good half of my essay The Blast Shack was about the basic problem of the NSA. Here was the takeaway from that essay back in 2010:

One minute’s thought would reveal that a vast, opaque electronic spy outfit like the National Security Agency is exceedingly dangerous to democracy. Really, it is. The NSA clearly violates all kinds of elementary principles of constitutional design. The NSA is the very antithesis of transparency, and accountability, and free elections, and free expression, and separation of powers — in other words, the NSA is a kind of giant, grown-up, anti-Wikileaks. And it always has been. And we’re used to that. We pay no mind.

Well, dear readers, nowadays we do pay that some mind. Yes, that was then, while this is now.

So, I no longer feel that leaden discontent and those grave misgivings that I felt in 2010. The situation now is frankly exhilarating. It no longer has that look-and-feel of the Edgar Allen Poe House of Usher. This scene is straight outta Nikolai Gogol.

This is the kind of comedic situation that Russians find hilarious. I mean, sure it’s plenty bad and all that, PRISM, XKeyScore, show trials, surveillance, threats to what’s left of journalism, sure, I get all that, I’m properly concerned. None of that stops it from being hilarious.

Few geopolitical situations can ever give the Russians a full, free, rib-busting belly laugh. This one sure does — via redwolf.newsvine.com