This Thursday – Steve Meretzky and Michael Bywater, London

Very Late Update: An audio recording of the event is available here (90MB .ogg file)

In honour of the BAFTA award nomination for the BBC’s new Internet edition of the classic Infocom computer game, The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy, we present two titans of the text adventure:

Steve Meretzky and Michael Bywater, in conversation

(on interactive fiction, Douglas Adams and other lost worlds)

As well as working with Douglas Adams on the Hitchhiker’s game in 1985, Steve Meretzky is responsible for such other classics of the genre as Planetfall, Leather Goddesses of Phobos and Zork Zero. In 1999 he was named one of the industry’s 25 “Game Gods” by PC Gamer magazine. He currently holds the position of Principal Game Designer for WorldWinner, Inc.

Veteran writer and broadcaster Michael Bywater has been involved with interactive storytelling since the eighties, both with Douglas Adams on Infocom’s Bureaucracy and the legendary British games company Magnetic Scrolls. He worked with Adams again in the mid-nineties on The Digital Village’s Starship Titanic. His third book, Lost Worlds: What Have We Lost & Where Did It Go? (not, as previously suggested, a collection of his columns for The Independent On Sunday) is out now.

Date: Thursday 3rd March, 8:00pm

Price: £4 on the door – all proceeds go to Save The Rhino and The Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund

Venue: The Brockway Room, Conway Hall, 25 Red Lion Square, London WC1R 4RL (map)

Any questions: yoz@yoz.com

Steve Meretzky event next week – venue wanted

Due to the BAFTA-nomination of the BBC’s new version of the Hitchhiker’s text adventure (as updated by Sean, Shim and Rod Lord), the guy who co-created the original game is coming to town next week.

We think it’d be fab if we could get him in conversation publically, you know, giving a talk about the games he’s worked on (such as the legendary Planetfall and Leather Goddesses of Phobos), the history of Infocom, his work at WorldWinner and all that.

Except:

1. We need to find a decent central London talk venue for 100-or-so people
2. Once we have that venue, we need to announce it

The most suitable date for this is Thursday 3rd March. (There is a small but definite chance that it may be Tuesday 1st instead, but for now, it’s the Thursday we’re working on.) Obviously, final details will be posted here once I have them.

Can you help? Let us know.

UPDATE: All sorted. Big thanks to James Wallis for the venue suggestion and James Cronin for booking it!

Grave intelligence

For those of you who haven’t yet heard (forgive me, I’ve been really disorganised and somewhat relying on network effects): The shortest audioblog post evar. (200k mp3)

A crap fix for a crap bug (Soft hyphens in Mozilla)

Here’s something that you probably didn’t know (it was certainly news to me): Mozilla’s HTML 4.0 support is lacking. Some go as far as saying it’s not fully compliant. It’s always been like this; even worse, in this particular area, IE’s support is just fine. It’s just the kind of standards-conformance problem that designers should be screaming about, yet there’s mostly an eerie silence on the topic.

Read the rest of this entry »

Goodbye CAPTCHAs, hello Distributed Porn-Powered Processing

There are some things that machines are better at doing than people, and vice versa. Automation is all about the former and CAPTCHAs – those little mangled-text images that you have to type in before you’re allowed a free email account – are all about the latter.

The purpose of CAPTCHAs is to foil automated attempts by spammers to harvest tons of free email accounts. The trouble is that, as was identified over a year ago, you can automate circumvention, if you’re clever about how you harness and use human processing power. In this case, you set up a site with content that people really want to get. (Porn, or warez, or… you get the idea.) In order for people to get to the content, they have to go through a CAPTCHA test – except that the CAPTCHA is actually grabbed from the web service whose defenses you want to breach. Your eager porn-surfing visitors are doing all the hard work for you.

I’m writing about this now in response to this post by Jon Udell, which discusses some of the pros and cons of CAPTCHAs. The main downside he identifies is that, in order to withstand computational defeat, some CAPTCHAs have become so hard that the average human can’t pass them. Similarly, as Matt May points out in this excellent post, CAPTCHAs are an accessibility black hole.
While these are notable problems, I think it’s pretty trivial compared to the CAPTCHA-farming idea I’ve outlined above, which lowers the CAPTCHA barrier to a trivially-breakable level.

To sum up: CAPTCHAs are a pain to users, they trample all over good accessibility practice and, most importantly, they’re useless as a defense against automation. So why the hell are Yahoo et al still using them? Am I wrong in calling CAPTCHA a dead duck? (I have no metrics to back them up, and invite any web techies from large CAPTCHA-using services to contradict me)

I took note of the CAPTCHA-farming idea when I saw it because it’s an ingenious way of harnessing large amounts of brainpower in tiny chunks, for which there are all kinds of applications. Here’s an example: instead of making CAPTCHA-style image tests which look like this…

… make ones that look like this…

… and then you can lay off half of your data entry & verification staff. (The above image is an excerpt from a census form on this Lockheed Martin press release, which claims that they have handwriting-recognition up to 85% accuracy. That still leaves a ton of human intervention if you’re dealing with 100,000 forms)

Okay, I’m not being entirely serious with that example, but there are industries out there existing entirely to harness the power of web surfers who’ve lost their way. Prime example: those websites full of secondary link lists that exist purely to show up in Google results and act as a banner-loaded intermediary before sending the on their way to buy a digital camera, via an affiliate link. Popular Power – the late lamented startup that wanted to sell spare cycles of desktop computers to computationally-hungry customers – was aiming at the wrong resource. Distributed CPU cycles are worthless unless you’re SETI or Pixar. Distributed brain cycles… now that’s a much more intriguing proposition.

Or, to put it another way…

Tired: Third-world data-processing sweatshops

Wired: Thousands of clueless web surfers + a good aggregation engine

Mmm, yummy

Those of you who are subscribed to my blog and frustrated by my wild inconsistency in output may be even more frustrated to learn that I have been blogging consistently for several months now, just not here. Of course, it’s easy to blog consistently when all you’re doing is saving a link and adding one occasionally-witty line of comment, which is why I’ve put so much more into my del.icio.us linkblog. Clicking on that link takes you to my full del.icio.us account, which may be rather more than you want, since I also use it just for things I want to bookmark for myself. Links that I specifically want other people to see – about a third of the total – go into my top tag, from where they are reflected to Haddock Linkblogs. So if you want a good linkblog from me, I’d suggest starting with top. One day, I may even get around to integrating into this site, if I can find the room in my hideously-crowded front-page layout.

(Other recommended tags, based purely on the amount I throw into them: perl, software, windows and funny.)

I’ve been a big fan of del.icio.us for a long time and have done occasional bits of hacking on it, such as my avar.icio.us posting interface (some bits of which have now found their way into Greg Sadetsky’s fabulous nutr.itio.us). Today, I wondered why nobody appeared to have done a Firefox search plugin. Twenty minutes later, here they are:

• del.icio.us – your bookmarks
• del.icio.us – all bookmarks

May all your links be yummy.

Four things that are free/cheap and nice

1. For the browsing and management of your project’s code and knowledge, Trac (running on top of Subversion) takes on and beats the usual mixture of cvsweb + Bugzilla + SomeRandomWiki for 90% of tasks. It’s still at version 0.7.1 (0.8 only a few days away, apparently) but already has a ton of useful features (easy linking between issues, wiki pages and files is not to be sniffed at) and a gorgeous design to boot. Check out Trac’s own Trac to see it in action, especially nifty tricks like the Roadmap. I’ve set it up myself, and installation is trivial once you have all the required dependencies. (I hit a problem with PySQLite, but that’s now been clarified in the install docs). If you want something similar for CVS, check out cvstrac.
2. Still on software engineering, BuildBot is a Python-powered client-server setup for automated building and testing – somewhat like Tinderbox but easier to set up. It can watch your repository (CVS, svn or arch) for updates then automatically run a build, farming build tasks out to buildslaves running on multiple machines. (We’re working towards it automating our builds on Windows, Linux and Solaris) It produces a web report with all the necessary logs and can also send notifications over email and IRC – see the PyCon paper for a good overview. Currently at version 0.6, it’s under active development and I’ve had a lot of good support from the developer list. If you’re installing on Windows, make sure to grab the latest version from CVS, which has a lot of post-0.6 fixes.
3. I’m sure you’re sick of all the Firefox Firefox Firefox over the past week, but did you know about the MOOX builds? Compiled for Windows with a bunch of extra optimisations, they’re about 20% faster than the official releases with no loss of functionality or stability. I’m running an M2 build at home on my Athlon XP and I’m very happy with it.
4. I remember when a decent four-port KVM with keyboard control cost a couple of hundred quid. Now Ebuyer have one for £28. We’re using it at work and it’s just lovely – can even power itself from the connected machines. Check the reviews.

Found on LambdaMOO, unattributed

Date: Fri Oct 29 13:45:53 2004 PDT

From: ?

To: *Short Attention Span Theater (#75504)

First they came for the Jews and I said nothing because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for the homosexuals and I said nothing because I was not a homosexual.

Then I realized that there would never be anything good on television ever again.

Monday morning quiz: Pop lyrics

Name the fairly popular, fairly recent (all within two years apart from the last) hits which featured these words/names in the lyrics:

1. Hector
2. refectories
3. shrapnel
4. Munchausen
5. bupkis

Tchotchkes on trial

The F-Secure blog is continuing to provide excellent value for my attention-dollar: Marketing wanted to brand some free giveaway security-related widgets, but was smart enough to ask the anti-virus coders to test them first. After gaining superiority in a matter of seconds, the gang went on to trash some laptops. Computer security’s about more than just software, y’know.