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This summer I am off in the far away land known as Connecticut at the Research Experience for Undergraduates at Fairfield University. Thankfully, the wonders of the series of tubes allow me to blog from this desolate land.

When I tell people that I am doing research in the field of Computer Security they think of hackers and viruses and guns and Global Thermonuclear War.  Sadly, my research group is only focusing on the topic of CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart).  Though it may sound boring in comparison, I actually have gotten pretty excited about it and will attempt to share some of that excitement.

For those of you who don’t know, a CAPTCHA is the name assigned to those annoying tests that you need to take when signing up for an account (an example can be found in the upper left corner of this post).  The basic idea is that only humans should be able to pass these tests so that spammers and other bad people cannot go around and write a script to create 7 million email accounts in 3 seconds for the purposes of spamming us.

Continue reading “Do CAPTCHA’s Offend You?”

Several weeks ago, John Pavlus wrote an excellent piece, Confessions of a Recovering Lifehacker, that effectively lanced many of the “productivity hacks” that have come to make distraction feel worthwhile.  Pavlus writes that, ” lifehacking is so seductive because it’s simply easier than asking some bigger, harder, more important questions about where your time and attention go…the stakes are low” – in short, he writes, if you clear out your Gmail, you feel tremendously accomplished, and if you don’t, you’ll still be annoyed by something that plagues almost everybody anyway, so, no big deal.  The risks are low, but the gratification and self-satisfaction are high.

Continue reading “The Delusion of Doing”

We’ve been thinking about this for a while, and we’ve come to entirely unique conclusion that Apple will release a TV sometime this year or next.  We write this not because we’re the first to think of it, but because we want to be able to say “told you so” when it happens.  We believe … Continue reading We Think Apple Will Release a TV Soon

The writers of this blog would like to make known their humble opinion that Mad Men is the greatest TV show of all time, and quite possibly, the greatest innovation since that whole internet thing.  The writers would also like to mention that HBO’s The Pacific is excellent as well, and that they wish there were more … Continue reading Mad Men is the Single Greatest Show Ever

Google made their foray into the cloud with Drive.  Of all the potential naming options – ‘box, cloud, disk, attic, drive – it’s interesting that Google chose the one that appears right before Dropbox, their competitor, in your smartphone menu.  Just saying… Continue reading My Driving Conspiracy Theory

The recent war between Google and Apple over the place of maps in iOS underscores how firmly the tech world has come to favor smartphones as the ultimate convergence device.  That Apple and Google are now locked in a struggle that formerly belonged to Navteq and Tom Tom cements the fact that, by my estimation, … Continue reading On Maps and Apps

Following a lukewarm IPO and bloody second day, Facebook’s third day on the market was pretty lousy, too. An interesting breakdown of who owns what part of FB is available here. Continue reading Facebook Stock Sinks Nearly 9%

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.  It was the time of the SUV, the flip-phone, and cargo pants.  Google was just a search engine and Apple made PCs. Heck, there was even a website called MySpace.  In seeking to relive the glory days, of, oh, 2003, AOL recently relaunched AIM, the … Continue reading Return of the Early-00s: AIM is Back!

For the second time in the last few months, Apple has passed ExxonMobil in market capitalization, to become the most valuable corporation on earth, worth some $468 Billion, as of Friday, compared to ExxonMobil’s paltry $405 Billion.  However you shake it, that’s a lot of iPads – or gas station visits. Though this is the … Continue reading The ‘pad is Mightier than the Pump

While trying to start up the Cooper Union Volunteer Tutoring Initiative, I have discovered an interesting policy in NYC’s Department of Education that is of interests to students of Game Theory. In order for a volunteer to be in contact with public school children on school property, he or she must be fingerprinted in order … Continue reading A Classic Case of the Volunteer’s Dilemma