Geek Drivel

The Wall Street Journal confirms what most people have suspected for a long time: size does matter.

Those of you keeping track may have noticed that I’ve tried, since starting this blog, to post at least one entry a day. You may also have noticed a few gaps recently. Those don’t indicate a lack of enthusiasm on my part, just a lack of time: I’ve gotten very busy with Project X recently, and I presently don’t have the time to peruse the web for interesting tidbits like I used to. So I’m abandoning that format, at least temporarily, and will just post when I find something I think is interesting. We’ll see how it goes.

…as anyone living in the last decade with two eyes and a brain could have told you.

I don’t know a lot about history, but if you go to Google.com at the moment, type in French Military Victories, and hit the “I’m feeling lucky” button, you get a fake Google page (yes, it looks real, but it isn’t — look at the address bar) with this text:

Did you mean: french military defeats

No standard web pages containing all your search terms were found.

Your search - french military victories - did not match any documents.

Suggestions:

- Make sure all words are spelled correctly.
- Try different keywords.
- Try more general keywords.
- Try fewer keywords.

Also, you can try Google Answers for expert help with your search.

Even worse, following the “suggested” link gives you a page (at the same site) titled “The Complete Military History of France” with a (very heavily biased) military history of the country to back up its point.

Somebody seems to have a grudge against the French.

Frankly, I prefer the miserable failure Googlebomb, which Google defused that more than a year ago, but this one managed to get some attention — I heard about it from Christopher Linfoot’s blog.

Windows Vista, how do I dislike thee? The New York Times counts the ways — using Microsoft’s internal e-mails from their own staff and board members to do it.

…I hate it. The clouds crapped about two feet onto us today, ruining the 60th birthday party that my wife had been organizing for her mother for the past several weeks. I wonder what the Sahara is like this time of year…?

Why am I not surprised?

The first public beta of IE8 is now available, and the big news is that MS has finally decided to fully support web standards (and it’s about time!). Why the sudden change of heart? They aren’t talking, but OSnews may have tagged it… it’s amazing what a little self-interest will do.

CAPTCHAs, the automated tests that are meant to prevent spam-bots from overrunning free e-mail services and comment forms, have been defeated. What’s next? Hopefully not something like this… I tried it three times, and only succeeded twice.

Statistics also indicate that it wouldn’t work too well — there are less than 30 variations, so even randomly choosing three of the pictures would result in a greater than 3% success rate, which is likely sufficient for spammers. And if there are only a set number of pictures to choose from, it would be easy to have a human classify them the first time they’re seen, and the computer to remember the classification (several of the same pictures came up multiple times while I was trying it). And I could think of fairly simple algorithms that would bump up the accuracy. It’s a tough problem.

When you run into a tough problem in math, it usually pays to see whether parts of it can be transformed into an easier one. For example: using public-key technology, it’s easy to confirm whether two digital signatures refer to the same ID or not, without giving out the information needed to duplicate that ID. Find some way to verify someone initially, and public-key technology could be used to confirm that it’s the same person later. It’s not foolproof (the private part of the key data could still be stolen), but it would be a major pain in the spammers’ tails.

Of course, all of this may become moot as soon as someone develops a true learning AI, one that could solve such a problem as well as a human. That kind of AI could easily be used by the bad guys to get around any CAPTCHA problem, but it could also easily identify and delete spam messages with an extremely high accuracy level. I suspect that the latter would more than make up for the former, because there are only a limited number of ways that you can write a message advertising something.

It’s a very interesting subject, all around.

A moment of silence please, to mourn the passing of the creator of a game that defined a generation of young nerds, including yours truly. (Thanks, Joshua.)