davidbnewquist's comments

I'm a little sick of the Mac/PC geek stereotypes.

Here's another promo that features a radically different geek type.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RgNyoxpENXc

"Currently BBC iPlayer TV programmes are available to play in the UK only".

Sighs that my quine is so 1999...

#!/usr/bin/perl

$x = <<'LOL';

#Meaningless chart/data is meaningless

$x =~ s/\x67less/\x67ful/g;

$x =~ s/((7less)|(7ful))(.+?)((7ful)|(7less))/$5$4$1/g;

print "#!/usr/bin/perl\n\n\$x = <<'LOL';\n${x}LOL\n";

print $x;

LOL

#Meaningless chart/data is meaningless

$x =~ s/\x67less/\x67ful/g;

$x =~ s/((7less)|(7ful))(.+?)((7ful)|(7less))/$5$4$1/g;

print "#!/usr/bin/perl\n\n\$x = <<'LOL';\n${x}LOL\n";

print $x;

To obtain a laugh from the following perl code: 1)run 2)obtain output 3)run output 4)repeat 2-4

The site does imply (and this may not be true) that someone always gets a commission on every purchase through the site. So if I want to buy a new camcorder, maybe I could ask a friend to be an "expert" and we could split the commision? That may be a strong initial incentive--effectively its a discount over a direct buy amazon.com.

This would seem to be an exploit, but it may still be a win-win-win for the friends, amazon.com and browseology.com.

Later down the road, established experts may be able to create real value for potential shoppers. I like the concept of being able to "shop" for my salesperson. Often time I go into Bes..err.."a big electronics retailer", hoping to get expert advice on a product but get stuck with a sales staff that can't answer my questions.

I would actually feel good about awarding a commission to a sufficiently knowledgeable salesperson.

If I want to buy a specific new camcorder, can I sign up as an expert and take my own recommendation?:)

I like your "big elephant leads little elephant" logo: it's inviting and representative of your biz.

It's possible that the article itself may be a counterexample: NYT is running ads alongside this story. So NYT is at least trying to be profitable from online ads.

The author laments: "Web advertising will never be profitable enough to support ambitious news gathering."

Really?

Actually, I think 'arguably' could be removed in that context without being disingenuous. Thank you for the feedback.

So by removing that word, I'd be adding 'truthiness'?

Misspellings are deliberate and enhance security. Note that you still knew to pick the misspelled "striped plan" and passed. Another label for that picture might be "stryped plain".

Also, you correctly identified hydrant because "moon lander" fortunately was not one of the choices:)

Its true that a 2 panel peoplesign is slightly larger than most text-based CAPTCHAs. However, there will soon be an option to use only 1 panel, which will hopefully make it small enough even for space conscious sites.

Thanks JJ. You are right about English literacy being useful to pass. Soon, I will expose an option that uses picture labels instead of natural language phrases.

But don't throw the proverbial baby out with the metaphorical bath water! The literacy requirement may be an effective defense against the armies of human sweatshop CAPTCHA solvers that we hear about in the news.

Regarding attacks, would be attackers have more important targets for now. peoplesign isn't yet protecting any major sites.

peoplesign images have been recolored using a "secret sauce" algorithm. Recoloring one of two similar pictures reduces effectiveness of color histogram matching. It even reduces effectiveness of more sophisticated color profile matching techniques. In short, the recoloration is defense against a particular type of attack.

Good call, in fact I'm working on this. I force numPanels >=2 because 1 panel currently causes layout issues.

You answered your own question. 30-40% > 3%.

But more deserves to be said. A site like Hotmail is a big, focused target for spammers. They face pain if a bot can beat their CAPTCHA even 10% of the time. Smaller sites get spam too, but they generally get it from dumber bots looking for unprotected sites. A 2 panel peoplesign CAPTCHA is probably all they need.

With 2 panels at 6 labels each, a random guess has a 1/36 chance to pass. Fortunately, a large number of incorrect guesses is behavior that can be detected and blacklisted.

Futhermore, peoplesign can be customized to offer more security. Number of panels (and soon number of menu labels) and other characteristics can be modified. Check out a customization demo at http://peoplesign.com/main/pickTheLabelDemo.html

Well, if the genes regulating sleep patterns are half as tedious as the gc params for the 1.4.2 JVM, I wouldn't want to consider every possibility either:P

In software, optimizing this type of garbage collection for low pauses usually results in reduced application throughput. Evolution in general clearly does not favor "low pause" sleep patterns.

However, there are anecdotes of rare people that subsist on "low pause" sleeping. Allegedly, Thomas Edison had a 24 word day and frequently cat-napped. Contrast that with Einstein who allegedly slept 10 hrs a night.

For modern garbage collection systems (e.g. the JVM), there is no single setting that is best (or even acceptable) for all applications. The same is probably true for sleep patterns.

time-ster! J/k. Maybe time2time?