Category: Uncategorized

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It’s a Cold, Code War

The news about Flame and its relatives being confirmed as a US/Israel coordinated attack on Iran has mostly been taken with the same awe that a Tom Clancy novel might instill in a reader.  We have the President(s) as our Jack Ryan, approving a massive long term software-based intelligence gathering/ infrastructure-crippling mission that keeps our … Continue reading It’s a Cold, Code War

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Shopping Online vs. On Line

I received an Amazon giftcard the other day.  As I perused the site and compared prices with other e-tailers such as Target, Best Buy and Wal-Mart, I found that, as always, Amazon undercuts its competition, especially with tax and shipping factored in. Since I spend much of my pocket change at Amazon, this discovery came as no surprise.

But what was surprising was an interesting metric; Amazon, nearly earth’s largest bookseller, books a net profit of only 1.34%.  Granted, they rely on volume, not margin, for profits, but this incredibly low number was compelling, and seems indicative of Amazon’s corporate philosophy of using loss leaders – like the Kindle Fire – and microscopic margins to catch and keep customers within its simple and increasingly expanding product and entertainment ecosystem.  The thinking is, as long as one buys a book at Amazon – giving them, say 28 cents on every $25 hardcover sold – one may as well purchase digital content from Amazon’s burgeoning music, video, and e-book selections.  And while you’re at it, why not everything else?

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Do CAPTCHA’s Offend You?

This can be frustrating sometimes.

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.

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The Delusion of Doing

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.

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