CAPTCHAs, those images of squiggly letters that are a pain to solve, help digitize books, and are increasingly being cracked by bots, are taking a new approach. Instead of being a still image, CAPTCHAs are now being made into videos of moving text so they're easier for a human to solve but more complicated for a bot with NuCaptcha. NuCaptcha's Basic service is free and still … [Read more...]
On Crash Protection and Farmville the Reason Behind Firefox 3.6.6
Mozilla Firefox 3.6.4 shipped June 22nd with a feature dubbed Crash Protection as well as a number of security and stability issues. From the Firefox 3.6.4 Release Notes: Firefox 3.6.4 provides uninterrupted browsing for Windows and Linux users when there is a crash in the Adobe Flash, Apple Quicktime or Microsoft Silverlight plugins. If a … [Read more...]
Microsoft Research’s Sleep Proxy
Saving energy through IT in an enterprise environment almost always comes at the expense of trading off something else. It could be security by not keeping machines on for patching, it could be accessibility by not keeping machines on for remote access, it could be inconvenience by having to wait for your computer to boot up and complete all of its start up tasks, or it could … [Read more...]
Bing’s Search History via Proxy
My friend was telling me about this interesting tidbit people had found at his work when using Microsoft's search engine Bing. Bing keeps a search history for you based on your external IP address. For most this won't be a big deal but if you're at work and going through a proxy, everybody will be sharing the same external IP address. This means you'll have a shared search … [Read more...]
Touring Blue Waters – The National Petascale Computing Facility
The NCSA held a community day yesterday at their new National Petascale Computing Facility located in Champaign, IL which will be the home of the Blue Waters Sustained Petascale Computing super-computer amongst other super computers. When the new hardware comes online next year it will be the world's fastest super-computer yet, powered by IBM's POWER7 systems. With the rest of … [Read more...]