melatonin - Slashdot User

3D-Based CAPTCHAs Become a Reality 192

Posted by Soulskill on Friday March 27, 2009 @09:16PM from the is-that-an-e-wait-i-think-it's-a-5-dangit-let-me-in dept.

mateuscb writes "A new way of creating a CAPTCHA using 3D objects has become a reality. The idea was thought up independently by blogger Taylor Hayward and by the folks at YUNiTi.com. 'Similar to Hayward's idea, this new technology relies on our ability to identify objects in 3D instead of using alphanumeric characters. YUNiti's 3D Captcha, however, has three objects in the challenge and extends the list of images to any object, not limiting it to animals as in Hayward's idea. This increases the challenge's level of complication to prevent computers from successfully making the correct guesses.' I, for one, welcome the thought of not having to read more and more complex CAPTCHA. Lately, I've been having a hard time getting CAPTCHA to work the first time."

Comment Functional (not procedural) (Score 1) 592

by melatonin on Wednesday December 10, 2008 @03:02AM (#26056535) Attached to: Best Paradigm For a First Programming Course?

For me, learning functional programming in comp sci was the most eye opening. This was part of my programming languages course. We did functional programming in Lisp, but we had to use it purely -- we couldn't declare variables. That, combined with what my OS prof said once, something like "there is no useful program that doesn't take input and produce output," gave me proper insight to what a clean, purposeful software solution is.

With functional programming, where you have no variables, everything you produce is a function of your input. Constants and the source code itself consist of the input. And of course your only goal is to produce output.

You can make designs that achieve a lot of functionality with a small amount of code by following that idea. Lisp itself is proof of that.

You can also create emacs. I'll stop here.

Finding Fault With Google's Privacy Policy 155

Posted by timothy on Saturday July 05, 2008 @05:50PM from the wonder-what-bill-joy-thinks-of-it dept.

orenh writes "Viacom has recently obtained a court order that requires Google to hand over a complete list of every video watched by YouTube users. These logs will include the login names and IP addresses of the users. Google are now asking Viacom if they can anonymize the logs before turning them over; Viacom hasn't responded yet. But this privacy nightmare could have been greatly reduced if Google had anonymized the data in advance. Google's privacy policy states that they keep personally identifiable information for 18 months. There is no real reason to do so; Google can achieve everything they need even if they anonymize their search logs after just one month, and it's time users told them to do so."

Submission + - Wii uses elliptic curve cryptography

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 15, 2007 @12:11PM

An anonymous reader writes: A user at the Nintendo-Scene forums just posted a lengthy post about his discovery that the Wii savegame files are signed and encrypted with NIST B 233 bit elliptic curve cryptography. Could this be the first step for a Wii softmod the homebrew community have waited for?

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