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Defeating Captcha
An anonymous reader pointed us at PWNtcha, a package that breaks various on-line captcha algorithms. The site provides numerous examples of easy (Paypal, and an older version of Slashdot make the list) and hard Captcha. It also links various sources explaining why Captcha is a bad idea.
Yo've captchaed me in de act of subvirt'n a Captcha! How'dar yo try'n expos' mi meth'd of get'n aeroun'd de Captchas!! Yo nit! How'dar yo expos' dis meth'd!
Just because the post begins with the word "Interesting" does not mean that you have to mod it interesting. Especially when it isn't.
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In December 2006, "Sparrowhawk: Book 6 - War," the last in the series, will be published. It opens in the Spring of 1774, and ends on the York River, Virginia, in the Fall of 1775. Ten years have passed since Jack Frake and Hugh Kenrick have foiled a plot to smuggle the hated tax stamps into Virginia. But the Crown has not learned that it cannot force the colonists to submit to Parliamentary authority. It repealed the Stamp Act but followed it up with twenty more pieces of coercive legislation. War is imminent.
The engine of tyranny is a blind, indifferent juggernaut, insensible to reason, justice and equity, and so necessarily inimical to them. It matters not the good intentions of the hand that launches it into the affairs of men. Once started, it moves almost of its own volition, corrupting, consuming and destroying everything in its path. It is a fundamentally nihilistic phenomenon. Its power is both centripetal and centrifugal, on one hand drawing its potency from that which it can corrupt; on the other, crushing or flinging aside the incorruptible.
The juggernaut of Parliamentary supremacy collided with the American colonies' incorruptible sense of liberty, which could be neither crushed nor flung aside. The result was a spectacular explosion: the American Revolution. That explosion was neither necessary nor foreordained. The colonies could have submitted to that supremacy, and existed for a time in a haze of semi-legality, occasional concession, and dependent prosperity. But British-Americans valued their liberty and were willing to claim it whole, come what may. Therefore, the clash between them and the legislative authority of Parliament could be postponed but never resolved. The colonials would not allow their claim to unabridged liberty to be corrupted. In the course of that political transfiguration, they became Americans.
Their original complaint was two-fold: against Parliament, which legislated their shackles; and against Rob Malda, who by colonial charter had been empowered to protect them from Parliamentary avarice, caprice and the shackles of un-moderated crap-flooding and trolling. The "patriot king" failed to protect them. He did not suggest, originate, or author any of the legislation subsequent to the Declaratory Act meant to bind and pillage the colonies without limit; it was merely his royal pleasure to sign it, although it was within his power to veto it. But, he would be a king, and so he surrendered that executive power to the exigencies of an empire of which he wished to be sovereign, but which, in fact, was Parliament.
This was the nature of the events that followed repeal of the Stamp Act and passage by Parliament of the Declaratory Act in 1766. By 1774, many of the men who had lent their hands to the imposition of an imperial design had come and gone since that repeal and passage. George Grenville. Gone. Thomas Whateley, his protégé in power. Gone. Charles Townshend, author of the notorious Townshend duties. Dead and gone. And so many more enemies of liberty, as well.
As good as gone had been William Pitt, Lord Privy Seal, whose ministry followed Rockingham's in 1766, but whose maladies and unpredictable temperament so debilitated him that Augustus Henry Fitzroy, third Duke of Grafton, and First Lord of the Treasury, became its effective head instead. Grafton, not by his own temperament hostile to the colonies or particularly ambitious, by ineptitude let his party and ministers establish colonial policy and enact legislation that increasingly worsened tensions between the colonies and Britain. His ministry was the epitome of malign neglect.
Uneasy with his political impotence, Grafton resigned, and went into opposition against the next ministry. Later, in Lords, he consistently voted against stringent measures against the colonies. He opposed the ministry he had sworn to support.
This was that of Frederick Lord North, a childhood friend of George the Third, who had succeeded Charles Townshend as Chancellor of the Exchequer, or p
Oh the irony.
never talk about any country's politics unless you want to bash them
political hogwash is such a dreary affair...