Tagged: blogging

US Supreme Court looks like one of the biggest losers here


I have just read an excellent account of the events around the US Supreme Court’s ruling on the Affordable Care Act (aka ‘Obamacare’).

English: West face of the United States Suprem...

English: West face of the United States Supreme Court building in Washington, D.C. Español: Edificio de la Corte Suprema de Estados Unidos en Washington, D.C. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

 

If you love news and journalism it’s a ripping tale and one in which CNN and Fox News both end up with egg over their faces (though at least CNN admitted their mistake – Fox never did).

But both journalistic organisations were principally guilty of trying too hard, not of a worse crime.

But what are we to make of the Supreme Court itself:

The Supreme Court will not grant SCOTUSblog a press credential. 

This is despite the fact that literally millions read it and other media organisations and the White House are relying on it to interpret the ruling.

The Court’s own technical staff prepares to load the opinion on to the Court’s website.  In years past, the Court would have emailed copies of the decision to the Solicitor General and the parties’ lawyers once it was announced.  But now it relies only on its website, where opinions are released approximately two minutes later.  The week before, the Court declined our request that it distribute this opinion to the press by email; it has complete faith in the exceptional effort it has made to ensure that the website will not fail.

But it does.  At this moment, the website is the subject of perhaps greater demand than any other site on the Internet – ever.  It is the one and only place where anyone in the country not at the building – including not just the public, but press editors and the White House – can get the ruling.  And millions of people are now on the site anxiously looking for the decision.  They multiply the burden of their individual visits many times over – hitting refresh again, and again, and again.  In the face of the crushing demand, the Court cannot publish its own decision.

The opinion will not appear on the website for a half-hour.  So everyone in the country not personally at 1 First St., NE in Washington, DC is completely dependent on the press to get the decision right.

Not good.

OK, not my country, but it looks like the court is struggling to update its approach to communications.

The end of the CAPTCHA?


CAPTCHA Insanity

CAPTCHA Insanity (Photo credit: JillOW)

Between 2009 and 2011 my work included establishing and editing a website (in English) about news and events in Georgia, in the Caucasus.

Lots goes on in Georgia – it’s a fascinating place – but the number of people interested in reading news in English about it is quite limited: still the site built up a good readership and was widely noted amongst the small international community that follow events there for academic, human rights and other reasons.

But Google Analytics also showed that the bulk of the audience was in Georgia itself. Some times this was because the website was one of the few places that gave a reasonably straight report of some controversial events there, especially if these involved criticism of, or statements by, the Georgian Orthodox Church, by far the most respected institution in the country and one that the government had a deeply uneasy relationship with.

But a growing audience also meant attracting spambots and how to deal with them was an important consideration. Even going away for a few days could attract many dozens of spam messages and deleting them was a pain. Bayesian filters for Drupal (the CMS) seemed to be quite poor, so that was not an automatic solution either.

So, I chose the CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart) – in this case some mangled text that would be posters had to decipher before they could successfully comment on the site. With the CAPTCHA spam all but disappeared (though plainly there are some desperate people even prepared to wade through CAPTCHAs to post their ads).

Now, nobody likes CAPTCHAs – they are a terrible pain, because quite often the text is so mangled it is difficult to read. But I discovered Georgian readers loathed them. For a start they were in an unfamiliar alphabet -he Georgian – Kartuli – alphabet is completely different (for instance there are no capital forms) from Roman or even Cyrillic, even if there are some Greek influences on it -  and then it required them to use a different keyboard layout. ი სტილლ ჰავე ა გეორგიან ლაყოუტ ავაილაბლე ჰერე – სო ტჰის ის სომე ენგლისჰ ტრანსლიტერატედ ინტო გეორგიან.

So eventually the CAPTCHA had to go and I went back to relying on poor quality Bayesian filtering and hand weeding.

Now, it seems, that might be where we are all headed: as Slashdot reports audio and video CAPTCHAs have been cracked and cracking software can even score a 1% success rate against reCAPTCHAs – the toughest type apparently (do read this link on reCAPTCHAs and the social function they fulfil, I often wondered why it was possible to ‘pass’ them with little better than guesses and now I know why).

The failure of audio CAPTCHAs is, I fear, quite likely to lead to their demise as a widely used security technique – as without them those using screen readers and similar audio technology may face some sever difficulties in accessing CAPTCHA guarded content.

Still, well implemented Bayesian and other filtering has already saved email from complete collapse, so maybe it is time to give the Georgians a break and turn all the CAPTCHAs off?

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Here we go again


I used to have a blog. It was meant to be about “politics and free software” (not the politics of free software) but ended up being mainly about politics. I wrote the last entry on that in January 2008 and subsequently took it off line (the content is still on my server at home and it was amusing to read it again just now, but it’s not going back up).

My politics haven’t changed – so if you want to do something to make Britain a better place to live I still recommend you start here.

But I am not going to write about politics here. The geeky title ought to give the game away – this one is about computing (and, I suppose, mathematics to an extent).

My inspiration came from this: generally speaking I am in the n – log(n) part of this matrix and while I am not interested in pursuing a career in computing I am passionate about improving my skills and competency, so the comment that a log(n) programmer “maintains a blog in which personal insights and thoughts on programming are shared”, left me with little choice.

Of course I’ll actually have to demonstrate some insights and thoughts too.