TechEye |  |
- Software cracks CAPTCHAs
- Scientists revolt against political interference
- MIT geek sex creates chips configured by light
- Apple's free software gives you what you pay for
- Analyst dismisses Forrester IT project failure claims
- Google gets back into handwriting
| Posted: 28 Oct 2013 04:52 AM PDT A technology start-up has written software to crack CAPTCHAs. CAPTCHAs are supposed to prove that you are human and have good eyesight, but if either can be proved by software the security system is basically doomed. According to Mashable, Vicarious co-founder Scott Phoenix said that his company developed the algorithm not for any nefarious purpose and not even to sell, said. He wanted to create a machine which works like the human brain. The company has not submitted a paper describing its methodology to an academic journal, which makes it difficult for outside experts to evaluate the claim. Vicarious offers a demonstration of its technology at vicarious.com, showing its algorithm breaking CAPTCHAs from Google and eBay's PayPal. CAPTCHAs can be broken by paying people in Bangladesh to do it manually. For 50 cents an hour, you can get someone to break seven per minute, he reckons. Vicarious said its algorithm achieves success rates of 90 to 97 percent, depending on the difficulty of the CAPTCHA; a CAPTCHA scheme is considered broken if a machine can break just one percent of the ones it generates. Google's reCAPTCHA uses words from old books and other publications that have been optically scanned but are difficult to digitise because they are so degraded. The feat required relatively tiny amounts of data and computing power, Vicarious said, instead using algorithms that mimic the perceptual and cognitive abilities of the human brain. |
| Scientists revolt against political interference Posted: 28 Oct 2013 02:58 AM PDT A scientific programme, which would prove that humans had nothing to do with global warming, has hit a snag. Nebraska State Senator Beau McCoy who wants his big business chums to make their profits while not doing something about the planet, dreamt up the theory that Global Warming was nothing to do with humans. He formed the Nebraska Climate Assessment and Response Committee to stand up their theory that global warming was "cyclical" and told them to gather a group of boffins who would confirm it. McCoy had not accounted for the fact that scientists would disagree with his basic premise and refuse to say that black was white, or the earth was flat. According to the Omaha World-Herald Bureau, Barbara Mayes, a meteorologist pointed out that "cyclical" isn't even a scientific term - it was just made up by McCoy because he was a climate change denier. University of Nebraska-Lincoln scientists said they wouldn't participate in the climate study if it excludes the influence of humans. Nebraska state climatologist Al Dutcher told the committee said he did not want his name on the study or to be used as a political pawn. |
| MIT geek sex creates chips configured by light Posted: 28 Oct 2013 02:37 AM PDT MIT researchers have emerged from their smoke filled labs after watching a coupling of photons and electrons on a topological insulator. This type of coupling had been predicted by theorists, but never observed, mostly because the photons and electrons are rather shy. The researchers think that now they have seen photons and electrons entwined on a topological insulator they can move on to create materials whose electronic properties could be "tuned" in real time simply by shining precise laser beams. According to this week's copy of Science, which we get for the coupling centrefold, the work "opens up a new avenue for optical manipulation of quantum states of matter". Nuh Gedik and Sarah Biedenharn, associate professor of physics and senior author of a paper ,described shooting femtosecond pulses of mid-infrared light at a sample of material. They then look at an electron spectrometer. They have seen a quantum-mechanical mixture of electrons and photons, known as a Floquet-Bloch state, in a crystalline solid. Swiss physicist Felix Bloch theorised this and thought it was because electrons move in a crystal in a regular, repeating pattern dictated by the periodic structure of the crystal lattice. Victor Galitski, a professor of physics at the University of Maryland who was not involved in this research, it "opens new avenues not only for optical control of topological states, but also more generally for engineering of new kinds of electronic states in solid-state systems". It all suggested that it was possible to alter the electronic properties of a material from a conductor to a semiconductor just by changing the laser beam's polarisation. It could mean that you could make a chip, which does not heat up at all. You could make a material to conduct electricity, or to be transparent simply shining light on the materials. |
| Apple's free software gives you what you pay for Posted: 28 Oct 2013 02:19 AM PDT Apple fanboys are a little miffed after the free upgrades to the iWork and iLife appear to be iDisappointing. Jobs' Mob promised iWork and iLife users would be given free upgrades to major new versions of the company's productivity and lifestyle apps. This was touted as Apple's Office killer. Why would you pay for Office when you could have something from Apple for free? But, according to some longtime users, the new versions of the apps are a step backwards in functionality. In short they might be free, but they have less than before. Apple's word processing app has lost its customisable toolbar, endnotes, and many templates. It seems to lack feature compatibility between iWork apps and Microsoft Office apps, like Microsoft Word to Pages and Power Point to Keynote. Apple once used these apps to lure people away from Office. Apple of course is saying nothing about the change. Customers should be grateful for whatever bounty the cargo cult provides its worshippers. The tame apple press is trying to palm the change off as a "simplification." Simplification is a much nicer word than saying "dumbing down", it evokes the concept of white minimalist architecture, where you can never find the doors. Cnet said that the new versions of the iWork and iLife apps are designed to be more in tune with their counterparts on iOS. But it admits that in the pursuit of unity between all of its devices, some features have gotten lost in the shuffle. The question is how much unity do people want and when it comes at the expense of functions that they need how practical is such simplification? |
| Analyst dismisses Forrester IT project failure claims Posted: 28 Oct 2013 02:12 AM PDT An analyst has dismissed a survey by Forrester which claimed that only 40 percent of IT projects meet their goals. A new report from Forrester shows high levels of dissatisfaction on both sides, and suggests more "integrated thinking" is needed. But writing in ZDNET, analyst Joe McKendrick dismissed the findings as being a "sound bite." He said that his 39 percent figure was optimistic compared to other studies done over the years, such as Standish Group's Chaos report, which suggests that only 30 percent of projects meet their goals. While it was true that there were many areas where IT organisations don't seem to be cutting the mustard, users were not making life easier. McKendrick pointed out that looking at the Forrester/EffectiveUI figures in another way it would appear that user organizational dysfunction is what keeps sending IT projects down in flames. More than half of the IT executives, 56 percent say the biggest problem they have is users constantly changing requirements on projects in midstream. Half of the IT leaders also say their departments are overburdened, and they end up "trying to do too much at once." More than one-third, 34 percent, believe they lack clear executive direction, while another 34 percent point to a lack of the right development talent. While Forrester produces figures which show that business' satisfaction with IT is lower than half, only a quarter of decision-makers place top priority on updating and modernising key legacy applications. Only a fifth consider mobile to be important enough to be bothered about. In short, users are getting the IT that they deserve. "Technology is only a tool -- it by itself won't put function into a dysfunctional organisation," McKendrick said. |
| Google gets back into handwriting Posted: 28 Oct 2013 02:10 AM PDT Google has been wasting its time coming up with a new feature for Gmail and Google Docs that allows users to hand write their emails and documents. The problem is that it does not do something useful like allowing the use of a radio controlled pen which writes on a notebook and translates the writing into text on a screen. Writing in its blog, Google claims that the chocolate teapot of software will help a student trying to include a foreign phrase in their paper. Apparently you can use your own handwriting to input words directly into Gmail and Google Docs with your mouse or trackpad, Google said in a blog post. Clearly this is not for English users who would find it simple just to type the word in. However in some languages writing with a mouse is easier. Chinese, Japanese, Hindi and Russian, Goggle claims. Google said the feature will be supported for more than 20 languages in Google Docs and more than 50 in Gmail. "Handwriting input makes the internet easier to use by people worldwide and is also part of a larger effort to break the barrier between languages," Google said. Google has missed a trick here. Two areas of computing which have been weaker in development than most have been optical character recognition and handwriting analysis. Since most people find it easier and faster to type, handwriting has gone down the gurgler despite it being the easiest interface possible. |
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