As a young person(21) with DVR in my room, I have to say that I don't always skip the ads.
Most often I am watching tv live, and I can only fast forward through something that has either already been aired and recorded, or is ondemand. Fortunately, the DVR will record two channels at once; either the one or two channels I specify, or the last channel I was at and the current channel I am at. This lets me watch two channels back and forth.
Sometimes I have the tv on as background, or am only somewhat paying attention to it. The second most common reason for not skipping, for me(aside from watching live), is that I simply forget that I can fast forward! I frequently wake up from some kind of mindless daze in the middle of a commercial and realize... "oh, WTF am I doing?!", then start fast forwarding. This can even happen more than once or twice in the very same program.
>What about the form that is around the captcha, generally a new account application, etc? What if those were to be made dynamic so the automated software trying to look for a hard-coded form fail?
Even if this were dynamic, there is only so many possible methods of displaying a form while still letting it be decipherable by a human. Given this limited set of possibilities, the programmer of a spam bot needs only to take into account any possible page mutations. More likely though, the spammer doesn't even look at a certain spot on the page; they probably do a little javascript to search the DOM for all text boxes and all images and ignores any images it already has copies of, the remainder image is likely the captcha. Then they would just search for context clues around the text boxes to see which box is most likely to be the one that accepts the captcha answer.
>Or better yet, have questions that modern computer AI has yet to break. Show a picture of a circle and ask "is this round?" or "is this not round?". Generally make the questions a bit more complex as AI gets better.
This is also suffers from the problem of limited number of possibilities. If someone can spend time putting questions in, someone can spend time filling in answers, and they only have to fill in answers once, after that, the bot can remember them for the next time it sees the same question.
If some sort of AI was used that could ask common sense questions, like cyc, the problem would be that the spammers have access to the very same AI.
The leading thought is that AI is not going to create better CAPTCHAs, but that bots that break CAPTCHAs are going to create better AI.
>I wonder if there could be some sort of AI research project that works in conjunction with a captcha system. Not exactly AI, but the reCACPTCHA project does uses CAPTCHAs to decipher text that OCR programs can't when scanning books.
But does it have spell check? Can you sort by address? Does it double as a flash light? There was something else that I wanted to ask about related to Linux, but I forgot what it was now.
Besides, I can see how "hackers" would have a problem with this inevitable conversation: [Prospective mate]/[Peer to be impress]: What do you do for a living? 'Hacker': I'm a cracker.
So FF3 won't be compatible with Win Me or older.. that might be a good thing. I wonder how many people are contemplating the switch, but arn't quite sure. This could cause a small influx of Linux newbies who were recently on the fence. This nicely complements users we might get because of the fact that Microsoft stopped supporting the older OSes.
The blog entry says that they use the same same utilities for Adwords as any other customer. Google search results are NOT part of the Google Adwords or Adsense services. You can't buy better search results on Google.
This means that the blog is NOT claiming that they do not enhance their own rankings in search results.
Additionally, there is no cost to them to do this. With Adwords, they have to pay the advertising site a set amount(half of what they bid, the other half looping back to them). This costs them in A) money payed to the website displaying their advertisement B) money not gained by users that would have clicked other advertisements
With search results, which the parent is talking about, no one is bidding on the top search spot. No one is being cheated, because Google makes no promises about the rankings in its search results, and no one is paying them for services that they are auto-trumping. Google is not a public service, and, is not a monopoly (yet?). Putting their services at the top of search results is both smart and in their best interests.
Further, Google is "The search company". Their forte is providing the best search results as they can. I imagine that they believe that their services are better than those of their competitors, which extends to, they probobly believe that they are improving their search results by making sure that their better services (in their opinion) are given priority, just as I am sure they manually remove spam from results in order to improve search results on more popular keywords.
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As a young person(21) with DVR in my room, I have to say that I don't always skip the ads.
Most often I am watching tv live, and I can only fast forward through something that has either already been aired and recorded, or is ondemand. Fortunately, the DVR will record two channels at once; either the one or two channels I specify, or the last channel I was at and the current channel I am at. This lets me watch two channels back and forth.
Sometimes I have the tv on as background, or am only somewhat paying attention to it. The second most common reason for not skipping, for me(aside from watching live), is that I simply forget that I can fast forward! I frequently wake up from some kind of mindless daze in the middle of a commercial and realize... "oh, WTF am I doing?!", then start fast forwarding. This can even happen more than once or twice in the very same program.
>What about the form that is around the captcha, generally a new account application, etc? What if those were to be made dynamic so the automated software trying to look for a hard-coded form fail?
Even if this were dynamic, there is only so many possible methods of displaying a form while still letting it be decipherable by a human. Given this limited set of possibilities, the programmer of a spam bot needs only to take into account any possible page mutations. More likely though, the spammer doesn't even look at a certain spot on the page; they probably do a little javascript to search the DOM for all text boxes and all images and ignores any images it already has copies of, the remainder image is likely the captcha. Then they would just search for context clues around the text boxes to see which box is most likely to be the one that accepts the captcha answer.
>Or better yet, have questions that modern computer AI has yet to break. Show a picture of a circle and ask "is this round?" or "is this not round?". Generally make the questions a bit more complex as AI gets better.
This is also suffers from the problem of limited number of possibilities. If someone can spend time putting questions in, someone can spend time filling in answers, and they only have to fill in answers once, after that, the bot can remember them for the next time it sees the same question.
If some sort of AI was used that could ask common sense questions, like cyc, the problem would be that the spammers have access to the very same AI.
The leading thought is that AI is not going to create better CAPTCHAs, but that bots that break CAPTCHAs are going to create better AI.
>I wonder if there could be some sort of AI research project that works in conjunction with a captcha system.
Not exactly AI, but the reCACPTCHA project does uses CAPTCHAs to decipher text that OCR programs can't when scanning books.
But does it have spell check? Can you sort by address? Does it double as a flash light? There was something else that I wanted to ask about related to Linux, but I forgot what it was now.
Besides, I can see how "hackers" would have a problem with this inevitable conversation:
[Prospective mate]/[Peer to be impress]: What do you do for a living?
'Hacker': I'm a cracker.
>You can't conceal a shotgun or Rifle which I'm sure is what he was using.
I was under the impression that he had 2 9mm's.
>I doubt many people with concealed weapons permits have ever gone on shooting sprees.
I think statistics agree with you.
I wonder what would happen if intelligent life were found on Mars.
So FF3 won't be compatible with Win Me or older.. that might be a good thing. I wonder how many people are contemplating the switch, but arn't quite sure. This could cause a small influx of Linux newbies who were recently on the fence. This nicely complements users we might get because of the fact that Microsoft stopped supporting the older OSes.
The blog entry says that they use the same same utilities for Adwords as any other customer.
Google search results are NOT part of the Google Adwords or Adsense services.
You can't buy better search results on Google.
This means that the blog is NOT claiming that they do not enhance their own rankings in search results.
Additionally, there is no cost to them to do this.
With Adwords, they have to pay the advertising site a set amount(half of what they bid, the other half looping back to them). This costs them in
A) money payed to the website displaying their advertisement
B) money not gained by users that would have clicked other advertisements
With search results, which the parent is talking about, no one is bidding on the top search spot. No one is being cheated, because Google makes no promises about the rankings in its search results, and no one is paying them for services that they are auto-trumping. Google is not a public service, and, is not a monopoly (yet?). Putting their services at the top of search results is both smart and in their best interests.
Further, Google is "The search company". Their forte is providing the best search results as they can. I imagine that they believe that their services are better than those of their competitors, which extends to, they probobly believe that they are improving their search results by making sure that their better services (in their opinion) are given priority, just as I am sure they manually remove spam from results in order to improve search results on more popular keywords.