Privacy

I was reading on TechCrunch (yes, thats one thing I read regularly), and I came across this comment about how being on the Internet implied lack of privacy. I thought it was an interesting thought, and it might actually be true in many cases.

I know a lot of companies out there are working day and night just so that your identity and data is "protected" on the web. Yet, the fact that you open up a browser window and type a url into it, does in some way mean that you might be compromising your data. Your IP is being captured, cookies are being delivered to your machine, and you are being asked to enter data that will continue to sit in some database 10 years from now. What's interesting is that all these things happen so unobstrusively that you hardly think twice about it.

The first few days of Buzz for example, were like that. Everyone wanted to try it out, but no one knew what was actually happening in the background. Google had automatically added certain sources of my information to share with the world, without making it clear to me it would do so.

Gone are the days when privacy meant having your own room.

ReCaptcha

Did you know that by filling out ReCaptcha captchas, you are actually contributing towards the digitization of books?

ReCaptcha started as a project at Carnegie Mellon that aimed at digitizing books. Captchas were already in implementation by then, and they recognized that a lot of human effort went into solving captchas every day around the world. They figured they could put this human effort to “use”.

ReCaptchas give you two words to solve. One word, they have the answer key to, but the other is an unsolved word from books and such, that they seek interpretation for. People like you and me solve the two words, and the system assumes our answer for the unsolved word is correct. They then present the same unsolved words multiple times to different users, and have a confidence rating in place to verify accuracy.

So, the moral of the story is, if you have a website that you want to protect from spammers and robots, use Captchas. And, if you want to do good while using it, use ReCaptchas!

Reference Source: http://recaptcha.net/learnmore.html

How much social can you handle?

So Google Buzz is here. I am all excited about playing more with it in the next few days. I jump every time I see a new Buzz!

But, on the other hand, I have been thinking, is there too much social going on? I mean, when I have a status update to share, do I put that on Buzz or on Facebook or on Twitter?

Is a centralized solution possible?