The ingenious crack is to offer a free porn site which requires that you key in the solution to a captcha -- which has been inlined from Yahoo or Hotmail -- before you can gain access. Free porn sites attract lots of users around the clock, and the spammers were able to generate captcha solutions fast enough to create as many throw-away email accounts as they wanted.

Now, chances are that they didn't need to do this, since optical character recognition has been shown to be readily tweakable to decode captchas without human intervention -- that which a computer can generate, a computer can often solve.

My cow-orker Seth Schoen points out that human-generated captchas are much harder to solve: say, picking out a photo of an animal, at a funny angle, in a cage, and challenging attackers to correctly identify it. People can do so readily, machines probably can't.

Except, of course, that getting people to pick out pix of animals at funny angles doesn't scale. Unless, of course, you offered them free porn to do so ("Want free porn? Identify the animal in this cage!").

Which suggests a curious future, where commodity pornography, in great quantities, is used to incent human actors to generate and solve Turing tests like captchas in similarily great quantities.

I am also old enough to remember the swill that Americans drank and were pleased to call "coffee" before Howard Schultz swept down out of his damp PNW redoubt and clusterbombed us with franchises. It tasted like soggy cardboard, it was served in chipped diner porcelain that itself generally tasted of soap, and most importantly, with a very few exceptions, it was all you could get anywhere.

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(via Kottke)

Strangely, the shipping industry's response isn't to keelhaul passengers who don't tip well on ocean cruises, or to hull random pleasure boats, or to demand special bow-mounted lasers that vaporize any ship that gets within a hundred miles.

Around the world, more than 20 sailors are known to have been murdered by pirates last year.

Seventy are missing, presumed dead.

Other trends are also emerging: ships are now less likely to be hijacked for their cargo; attackers, possibly from militant groups, are seizing ships and ransoming their crew.

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Tijuana Bibles were your grandfather's low-tech equivalent of Internet porn: pocket-sized stroke mags published between 1920 and 1960 featuring illustrations of "wildly sodomistic situations" and politically incorrect smut before anyone realized such a thing existed.

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There's anchor Gord Martineau calling fellow anchor Anne Mroczkowski a "fucking bint", not really giving a crap about pancreas transplants (diabetics everywhere, including my Dad, should kick his ass) and telling "homo" jokes, Irshad Manji passing out just as it's her turn to go on camera (a bit cruel, since unlike the others' behaviour, passing out really isn't a deliberate act) and funniest of all, crime reporter Jojo Chinto actually pinching some Grand Marnier from a counter while waiting for the owner of the house he's visiting to get dressed.

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(via The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century)

Writing the bulk of the poem itself took me around 15 hours over the course of several days, excluding the CSS tables (whose construction I describe below). As Leigh Ann Hildebrand observed, there were classical influences at work in my efforts; I realized immediately that I would need to begin with an invocation of the Muse. (My poetic skills were not up to constructing dactyllic hexameters, and I had already settled on the haiku form.) I used Prof. Touretzky's article "The CSS Decryption Algorithm" as my main source for the technical details, but I set myself a strict rule against using hexadecimal constants, because they seemed unpoetic. Everything had to come back into decimal form, because a number is a number. I also felt that it was important to include passages honoring and praising heroes (even using an epithet in the traditional epic way: "wise Andreas Bogk", only partly metri causa) together with a substantial amount of context. After all, one of the ways long poetry maintains interest is by telling several stories at once, and by painting scenery. Finally, I felt that expressing the fear of censorship directly and repeatedly within the poem itself created an interesting tension. It emphasized that the poem had really been written by a human author with a human voice and his own interests and passions. Aware of the prospect of censorship, the poem confronts would-be censors directly and takes them to task. By contrast, most source code is relatively defenseless: it can't fight against its own suppression, and it gives less direct evidence of being in a human voice, leading some people to accept its stigmatization as "merely mechanical" or "merely functional". I feel that it is essential that the poem constantly pleads for its own life -- an effect accomplished comically yet powerfully by Joe Wecker in "Descramble (This Function Is Void)"

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I shot a few panoramas for my blog when I was in Cambodia last week. This shows the controversial wax works diorama at the Cambodian Cultural Village theme park in Siem Riep - where the UN period of Cambodian history is summarised in a scene of a UN soldier with a bar girl. Also there is this panorama I shot from a balloon 200m above the Angkor plain.

The genetically modified weed has been coded to change color when its roots come in contact with nitrogen-dioxide (NO2) evaporating from explosives buried in soil.

Within three to six weeks from being sowed over land mine infested areas the small plant, a Thale Cress, will turn a warning red whenever close to a land mine.

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(via /.)

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A vulnerability in Borland Web Server 1.0b3 and earlier has been reported that ma...

The former slaves discuss how they felt about slavery, slaveholders, how slaves were coerced, their families, and, of course, freedom. It is important to keep in mind, however, that all of those interviewed spoke sixty or more years after the end of their enslavement, and it is their full lives, rather than their lives during slavery, that are reflected in their words. They have much to say about living as African Americans from the 1870s to the 1930s, and beyond. As part of their testimony, several of the ex-slaves sing songs, many of which were learned during the time of their enslavement.

TinyServer is reportedly prone to multiple input validation issues.

A remote ...

On today's edition of the National Public Radio program Day to Day:

"Never mind cell phones -- the newest trend in driver distractions is having multiple in-car video screens. Day to Day tech goddess Xeni Jardin profiles one man with 11 LCD video screens in his SUV -- even though, the man admits, he couldn't possibly fit 11 people inside. We go channel surfing on the highway."

Link to NPR feature, including photo gallery of life inside a blinged-out SUV, and archived audio.

Scoble's point, if I understand it, is that we are going to spend a bundle acquiring music from "legit" services like the iTunes Music Store and the upcoming Microsoft music store. If we spend hundreds of dollars on digital music, we should be on the lookout to protect and maximise that investment. I agree.

Well, says Scoble, all of the music that we buy from these legit services is going to have DRM use-restriction technology ("See, when you buy music from a service like Apple's iTunes or Napster (or MSN), it comes with DRM attached."). So the issue becomes "choosing between two competing lockin schemes."

And in that choice, says Scoble, Microsoft wins, because it has more licensees of its proprietary, lock-in format. That means that when you want to play your music in your car, it's more likely that you'll find a car-stereo manufacturer that has paid Microsoft to play Microsoft music than that you'll find one that has coughed up to Apple to play Apple music.

And this is the problem with Scoble's reasoning. We have a world today where we can buy CDs, we can download DRM-music, we can download non-DRM music from legit services, we can download "pirate" music from various services, and we can sometimes defeat DRM using off-the-shelf apps for Linux (which has a CD recovery tool that handily defeats CD DRM), the Mac (with tools like AudioHijack that make it easy to convert DRM music to MP3s or other open formats) and Windows (I assume, since I don't use Windows, but as Scoble points out, there's lots of Windows software out there.).

In this world where we have consumer choices to make, Scoble argues that our best buy is to pick the lock-in company that will have the largest number of licensees.

That's just about the worst choice you can make.

If I'm going to protect my investment in digital music, my best choice is clearly to invest in buying music in a format that anyone can make a player for. I should buy films, not kinetoscopes. I should buy VHS, not Betamax. I should buy analog tape, not DAT.

Because Scoble's right. If you buy Apple Music or if you buy Microsoft Music, you're screwed if you want to do something with that music that Apple or Microsoft doesn't like.

Copyright law has never said that the guy who makes the records gets to tell you what kind of record player you can use. If Scoble and his employer want to offer a product with "features" that their customers want, those features should reflect what their customers want: No Windows user rolled out of bed this morning and said, "I wish there was a way that I could get Microsoft to deliver me tools that allow me to do less with the music I buy."

No, the "customer" for Microsoft DRM is the guy who makes the records: the music industry; and not the gal who buys the records: you. That customer has already told Microsoft how it feels about its products: in the Broadcast Flag negotiation, the movie companies locked Microsoft DRM out of consideration for use in next-generation PVRs in favor of DRM that Sony (also a movie company, surprise, surprise) had a patent for.

Microsoft is selling out its customers to people who aren't even buying. Scoble points out that Microsoft licensed the hell out of its OS to hardware vendors, pioneering a new kind of open-ness. He's right. Microsoft set a good example that Apple has been too stupid to follow, and it's time for the company to do it again. When Microsoft shipped its first search-engine (which makes a copy of every page it searches), it violated the letter of copyright law. When Microsoft made its first proxy server (which makes a copy of every page it caches), it broke copyright law. When Microsoft shipped its first CD-ripping technology, it broke copyright law.

It broke copyright law because copyright law was broken. Copyright law changes all the time to reflect the new tools that companies like Microsoft invent. If Microsoft wants to deliver a compelling service to its customers, let it make general-purpose tools that have the side-effect of breaking Sony and Apple's DRM, giving its customers more choice in the players they use. Microsoft has shown its willingness to go head-to-head with antitrust people to defend its bottom line: next to them, the copyright courts and lawmakers are pantywaists, Microsoft could eat those guys for lunch, exactly the way Sony kicked their asses in 1984 when they defended their right to build and sell VCRs, even though some people might do bad things with them. Just like the early MP3 player makers did when they ate Sony's lunch by shipping product when Sony wouldn't.

But forget Microsoft, because Scoble's not talking about the best thing for Microsoft, he's talking about the best thing for you. The best way to protect your investment in music. Without a doubt, the best way to protect that investment is to only buy music that isn't in a lock-in format, and to break the locks on any music you do own, while you can. Scoble asks what you will do if "Apple doesn't make a system that plays its AAC format in a car stereo?" I'll tell you what you should do: you should get yourself tools to turn AACs into OGGs or MP3s right now, so that you can buy any car stereo you want and play your music on it. If you can't get those tools, you shouldn't buy AACs (Student: "What do I do if three thugs follow me down a dark deserted street in the middle of the night?" "Master: Don't walk down a dark deserted street in the middle of the night.")

Microsoft can pursue the bone-stupid strategy of kowtowing to the music labels instead of delivering the tools its customers want, but it's a dead end. When Sony invented the VCR, it did so after the movie companies had already decreed that they would only license their movies for use on the "Discovision," a hunk of shit best forgotten on the trashheap of history (much like the products that Sony later delivered instead of MP3 walkmen). With the VCR, though, Sony delivered what its customers wanted, and the movie companies got rich off of it, dragged kicking and screaming to the money-tree again.

Now, that's grandiose. Now that's visionary. Next to that, Microsoft's fraidy-cat technology is suicidally stupid, and so are you if you invest in it. Protect your investment. Vote with your wallet. Buy open.

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(via Batelle)

The Oracle HTTP Server is reportedly prone to a cross-site scripting issue in the 'username', 'pass...

Link 1, Link 2, Amazon link . (Thanks, Susannah!)

UPDATE: BoingBoing reader Evan DiBiase says: "It's definitely made people flee and faint when read in public, at least. I attended a reading of the author's at the University of Pittsburgh, and several people left during the reading of the story, and at least one gentleman who was sitting near me fainted, went completely stiff, and was carried out by a few men who I presume to have been his friends. Additionally, Pahlaniuk did mention that similar things had happened elsewhere, so it seems that we Pittsburghers are not especially squeamish. (For what it's worth, I sat through the whole thing...)"

And Joshua Terrell says, "This seems to be a sort of ongoing and semi-organized public art performance that your witnesses were party to - people have been faux-vomiting, fainting and having fits at Palahniuk readings going back several years. In fact, from what I have read and heard (and seen, once, in San Francisco), something like this happens at every single one of his readings. Google it and you will find many, many references & even a few people planning "barf-ins" at his readings."

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This is one of the most effective pieces of political advocacy I've ever seen. Ben Cohen, the Ben of Ben and Jerry's Ice Cream, narrates a short Flash movie for TrueMajority.org, in which he explains -- using Oreo cookies -- the way that the federal budget is currently apportioned, and how little rearrangement would be necessary to renew all of America's social programs. The examples are vivid and charming, and the logic is compelling.

The only thing I'd change is adding a fast-forward, pause and rewind button. I wanted to refer back to specific sections of the movie, and the "play all the way through" interface really frustrated me (just taking this screenshot was really hard).

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(via Vertical Hold)

Link 1, Link 2, Amazon link (Thanks, Susannah!)