CAPTCHA's - The Good, Bad, & Evil

Even if you don't know what a captcha is, you know what a captcha is. It's one of those odd and annoying little boxes at the bottom of a web form that has a few squiggly hard to read letters or words in it. You have to squint at it for a few moments, and then when you think you know which letters they are, type them into the field.

The purpose of these eye strain exercises is to ascertain that you are indeed a human, and not a spambot. That way web developers can assure that their web forms aren't hijacked by nefarious spambots, which will attempt press their webforms into the service of evil.

And, in case you were wondering, the term CAPTCHA stands for Completely Automated Public Turing Test To Tell Computers and Humans Apart, and was coined in 2000 by Luis von Ahn, Manuel Blum, Nicholas Hopper and John Langford of Carnegie Mellon University. See, this blog is both fun, and educational. For those of you however who don't know who Turing was, or what a Turing Test is, follow the aforetagged links.

Standard CAPTCHA -- just an image, not real.For now though, back to the captcha's. Although ostensibly agents of Good, they are supremely annoying. Some more so than others. The amount of captchas out there are endless. Most are the squiggly letter variant, but pretty much anything that is hard for a computer, but easy for a human will do. I figure, anything aside from the squiggly letter variant is a good thing.

For example, there are captchas out there that make you simply recognize an object, or answer a simple question. Very clever. Like this one.

Sadly though, recently we came across a new hybrid captcha that wins the prize for evil evolution. At first we didn't quite understand what was expected of us. It just looked like a regular captcha, but oddly, with an ad attached to it. It wasn't until after a few failed form submits, that we finally realized that the advertising captcha didn't just want us to view their ad, but they also wanted us enter that ad's tagline into the captcha itself — as proof that were a) human, and b) had paid sufficient attention to their banner ad. Great. Like the web isn't inundated enough with ads already.

I'm all for keeping spambots out of our life, and therefore gladly suffer through all types of captchas, good or bad. But when the ad banner demons start to get involved and decide to add an extra dollop of user pain in the process, well that's when things get ugly.

Data Wrangling - This is your brain on silicon

It should come as no surprise, that as a professional data wrangler, I am perpetually intrigued by data management systems. Anything from boring old lists (still love them) to ultra cool sci-fi holodeck databases, complete with snarky AIs.

As we all know, data does not equal knowledge. Having access to trillions of factoids is harmful, not useful. With so much data out there, it's all too easy to drown in data overload. In order to put the data to work you need a method of organizing it all. Find it, link it, tag it, share it — and if you're creative, add to it.

Database and internet engineers are constantly working on organizing data and search algorithms. No matter what the economy is doing, everybody needs help with their data. Our craving for data is incessant. Any game-changing development results in big leaps forward, and often, gazillion dollar businesses (Google ring a bell?).

So, I'm always looking for database tools that not only slap a new look on existing architectures, but especially new solutions that break conventions, opening up new ways of working and thinking.

The latest entrants we've run into recently are offered by an outfit called by TheBrain. They offer PersonalBrain for all your own thoughts and computer files. Essentially a file management system where the items are linked to each other, allowing you to jump around without having to remember where you put anything. Not necessarily a new idea, but their execution is very smooth. The way they bridge the gap between digital files and your own ideas is clever, and an interesting step towards the inevitable convergence of your brain and your digital files.

Pushing further, TheBrain also offers tools for linking groups of PersonalBrains into loose affiliations (WebBrain) or structured groups (BrainEKP). Organizing all your own data is one thing, but finding ways to creatively link multiple PersonalBrains via the interweb is where the real fun starts. Could be very interesting indeed.

Hop on over to TheBrain's website and check it out. They have a short vid on the home page, plus free downloads for Windows, Linux, and Mac.