Patrick Kennedy

Uganda is so poor that few can afford medical care, giving it one of the lowest life-expectancies on the planet -- this toxic combination made the country ripe for infiltration by Tiens, a Chinese Multi-Level-Marketing "nutritional supplements" cult whose members set up fake medical clinics that diagnose fake ailments and proscribe fake medicines, then rope patients into becoming cult recruiters who convince their friends to sign up for the cult. (more…)

We can't be far off a time where we can order buckets of paint by punching in RGB color values. The big paint companies could obviously do this, but right now all they seem to offer are elaborate, bloated interfaces wrapping their own marketing-driven color schemes. And I'll grant that the paint pigment gamut might have some very weakly-covered areas, lightfastedness issues, and so on. I hope whoever eventually does this (brand suggestion: LATHEX) also creates a robust API for it and a affiliate program, so that Paint Colors Invented By Neural Network can be tested and refined against thousands of actual purchases.

The US Postal Service recently announced a new series of stamps that feature balls from eight different sports.

The U.S. Postal Service will soon release first-of-a-kind stamps with the look — and feel — of actual balls used in eight popular sports. Available nationwide June 14, the Have a Ball! Forever stamps depict balls used in baseball, basketball, football, golf, kickball, soccer, tennis and volleyball.

The stamps are round but what’s really cool is that they will have a special coating that lets you feel the unique texture of each kind of ball — the baseball’s laces, the basketball’s nubby surface, the golf ball’s dimples. The ball stamps are available for preorder and will ship in mid-June.

See also their upcoming solar eclipse stamps, which are printed using thermochromic ink — when you touch them, the heat of your finger reveals the hidden Moon passing in front of the Sun. (via print)

Tags: design   sports   stamps   USPS

This wonderful and freaky GIF comes from a competition hosted by B3ta. You can see the original GIF created by the user ? and you can also follow B3ta on Facebook. Here are the two Donalds for comparison:

How do we know we’re human?

What is CAPTCHA? It’s demonic. It’s goofy. It’s at the center of a booming overseas cottage industry. It’s the most basic existential crisis. It looks cool in Russian. It’s the hold up between you and 1,000 pairs of Yeezy Boost 750s. And if it’s not keeping you from buying something en masse, it’s selling you something else: a Dr. Pepper or a Dish Network subscription or a Toyota RAV4. Also, it’s dying.

CAPTCHA, the Completely Automatic Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart, is something that should be simple but isn’t. Stepping away from any of its cultural or aesthetic significance, CAPTCHA is just a program that helps to stop spambots from spamming everything. It does this through kind of a cool trick: by mangling letters or numbers or both in a way that humans can read but computers can’t. Once the human types in the mangled words, the CAPTCHA is solved, and they can continue on to the spambot free web. And, okay, that’s a simplification, or at least a summary of a much earlier time.

At present, there are other, newer types of CAPTCHAs, and they work in slightly different ways. Some are like, “select all the pictures with a turkey.” Some are part of a larger, somewhat controversial crowdsourcing project. Some don’t show any words at all and rely heavily on your cookies. Some are actually ads. These variations (except the ad one) mostly reflect improvements in artificial intelligence, specifically in OCR, or machine vision, which type-in CAPTCHAs don’t protect against.

So it’s the old CAPTCHA, the type-in CAPTCHA, that’s going away. “Dying” if, like me, you’ll miss it, or see something important in the way it is now. “Evolving” and “improving” if not. Unlike much of what goes on in the day-to-day workings of our browsers, these type-in CAPTCHAs make themselves known to us. They’re visible, they’re interactive, by nature. Every CAPTCHA is a sort of conversation, albeit a very brief, often fraught one. And if other systems are more secure, or cleaner, or safer, It’s the act of questioning that differentiates CAPTCHA from other attempts to separate humans from bots. Even if, on the surface, the answer should be easy.

Are you a robot? No. See? Simple.

But CAPTCHA is a backronym, and like its developers realized way back in 2003, it’s hard not to ascribe some greater meaning to this wonky program after the fact. Plenty of people see CAPTCHA as a minor annoyance, get stumped and move on. But plenty more come back to it, take it out of context, scrutinize the interaction. There’s a feeling, often, of having been had. Maybe because of the look of it. Maybe because of the name, which seems to deviously combine “capture” with “gotcha.” But most of what you read about CAPTCHA online hinges on its central question: Are you a robot? Well, no. But what if you can’t read the text? Well, simple! The CAPTCHA regenerates and you try again. But what… if you still can’t read the text? OK. You fail, refresh, try again, fail, refresh, etc. Hm. Are you a robot?

It’s the implication of this impasse, more than the impasse itself, that makes CAPTCHA the source of so many things online. There are CAPTCHA memes, CAPTCHA rants, CAPTCHA comics, CAPTCHA creepypastas, CAPTCHA conspiracies, and CAPTCHA-critical fan fictions. Some of them play up the CAPTCHA’s look — the odd pastels, the slashed-up letters. Some, its content — total nonsense or cryptic phrasing like “nudism directed.” But this sort of general buzz gets at something bigger. Creepier. Something creepier, even, than the skimpy, spectral numbers CAPTCHA has you decode.

Take my favorite, “Scumbag CAPTCHA”:

And then look at this:

And this, on the newer, one-click CAPTCHAs:

Sure, these are pretty lame. But they’re scratching at something important. “Are you a robot?” And then, “Prove it.”

There are other examples, other things people take from their CAPTCHAs, illuminating in their own way. There are the “Robots are People Too” posters, mostly seen in fan fiction and memes. Read Le Penguin’s “A Captchaed Heart”. There are the CAPTCHA-as-demon uploads to YouTube. “Audio CAPTCHA — Performed by Demons from Hell”; “Ultimate Demon — Captcha Service Review”; “Demonic Hanicap-Accessible Gmail Audio Captcha”; and “Facebook Demon,” about an audio CAPTCHA on Facebook.

All of these things, through humor, fear mongering, or frustration, get around to questioning the things we’ve questioned always. How do we know we’re human? How do we get other people to know that, too? Is our life just some cheap, freaky simulation?

And how can you not wonder all that, looking at something like this:

So this is how we prove our humanity, by TYPEing-IN the dirty-sock arithmetic on a Tide-branded CAPTCHA. “Prove you’re human.” It’s so blah, so crass—not even a please. And the worst part: CAPTCHA was supposed to be a good thing! Reducing spam? Good! Halting the internet bot takeover? Good! Improving AI technology? Good, hopefully! Stopping one bot from buying up all the whatever and reselling it 500%? Yes! Good again! But CAPTCHA isn’t so straightforward. And through it’s question, and our often incorrect answers, a darker, more dysfunctional portrait of the internet and the economy behind it seems to tip its hand.

https://medium.com/media/c31cc7b67a190255174a2085a79580d2/href

The problems with CAPTCHA, the reasons behind its demise, go beyond the poetic. They go straight down to the code, to the way the puzzles are written and our ability to solve them. For one, CAPTCHA isn’t serving people equally. It’s measurably harder on some than on others. In one 2010 study, “How Good are Humans at Solving CAPTCHAs?” a team of Stanford researchers finds that some people are pretty bad at solving CAPTCHAs if they’re non-native speakers. Solving time shifts around based on education levels, too. And audio CAPTCHAs — remember, those demon things? — a supposedly reasonable alternative for the blind, prove the most confusing, as the solving time jumps up to nearly half a minute. That some people have such difficulty solving type-in CAPTCHAs makes the confrontation even ickier, when you consider what’s being asked (“are you a human?”) and what might get in the way of answering it.

As hard as CAPTCHAs are on some, they’ve become much easier for the bots they’re meant to keep out. Christopher Romero, a software developer, spoke with me about CAPTCHA’s history and a bit about the program’s possible future. Romero sees a shift by the major companies towards two-factor authentication to filter out sign-up spam. This is not, again, because the tech companies are questioning the broader implications of the “are you a robot” shtick, or even because of the problems they pose for people who have trouble seeing, or reading English. The robots are just getting smarter. They can read those dumb squiggly lines better than we can.

CAPTCHA is disappearing, if not into obscurity, then at least deep behind our screens, out of sight. Take Google’s little box-click system, called “No CAPTCHA ReCAPTCHA.” Here, there are no letters. No numbers. There’s nothing to type in. No CAPTCHA looks instead at your cookies, IP address, and the movements of your mouse when you get to the screen. The program still asks the same question, but there’s no longer a satisfying answer. The conversation is gone. Are you a robot? *click*. What makes type-in CAPTCHA so poignant, so perplexing, is how in your face it is. How you’re forced to look at it, and to grapple with it. Soon, we won’t be able to see CAPTCHAs at all.

The other thing killing CAPTCHA has less to do with a machine’s drive to learn and more to do with the old adage that some people never will. These are the giant CAPTCHA-solving labor farms. Worker exploitation! Dubious legality! Flimsy and obvious industry-wide lies, promising that these companies exist to benefit OCR technology, and, uh, are for “research purposes.” Research, which does play a legitimate role in CAPTCHA development, is almost definitely not the reason “ImageTyperz” exists. So what are these companies really for? Who uses them? Really, anyone in the business of low-level, automated spamming on a large scale: pushing a product or link over and over again in comments, purchasing hundreds of tickets or shoes for resale, or opening lots of accounts for click fraud. CAPTCHA cracking is a numbers game, both in process and reward.

Popular sites like DeathByCaptcha, Anti Captcha, DeCaptcher, Captcha Sniper and ExpertDecoders offer “CAPTCHA bypass done right,” have 24/7 support, and “process” tens of thousands of CAPTCHAs per day, charging between 2 and 40 dollars per 1000 CAPTCHAs solved. (Interested in starting your own? There are plenty of resources to show you how.) The sites, which, again, are very professional and offer important “research” support to machine-learning developers, have lots of pictures that look like this:

The addresses are mostly foreign—anywhere from Edinburgh to Dhaka to Rostock—are and bolstered by a work-from-home labor base that extends even further. The higher-ups are just called “admins” and they aren’t quick to respond for comments. So I took advantage of the 24/7 support systems to try to figure out what goes on in the CAPTCHA farms — how they operate, and, really, to see if they’d answer.

Here’s me, talking to support at DeathByCaptcha.

During our chat, which lasted almost exactly an hour (3:18 p.m. to 4:20 p.m.), I was a bit worried that my live support might, herself, be a bot. But the change in tone when it became clear I wasn’t signing up for anything convinced me otherwise.

The conversation ended, abruptly, and then I couldn’t access live support anymore.

This same thing happened at a few other sites. I was iced out of ImageTyperz pretty quickly, and got an “unusual sign in” warning from Microsoft after trying to Skype with DeCoders. What drew so many people to these classic CAPTCHAs that these farms exist? It’s the look, sure, but it’s also what’s behind it. All the ways people make money from the technology and its hacks, all the ways people scam it, only make the question feel more urgent. What is the proof of our humanity? And who wants to know?

But the question now is more one of what will replace it. Invisible CAPTCHAs are next, the logical step after No CAPTCHA. And other forms of authentication, beyond CAPTCHA or two-factor, are cropping up, which also look to answer the human question through data, instead of conversation. Areyouahuman.com is one of the companies offering a vision for the future of “Human Detection.” The flow-chart explanation for how this works is pretty opaque, but seems to be a more long-term tracking service, not designed to keep bots out entirely, but to keep them from influencing Google Analytics. Their banner ads read, “Be certain you’re addressing a Verified Human before you serve content, services or ads.” Then they boast: “Analyzing each user’s behavior in many different environments every day helps us verify and re-verify that verified humans stay human.”

Verify and re-verify that verified humans stay human. Is that better than “Prove you’re not a robot?” Worse? There’s something skeevy in answering a question you didn’t know you were being asked. And worse in not even knowing you answered. And worse still in doing it again, and again, “every day.” “In many different environments.” Exhausting. CAPTCHA, flawed as it is, is one of those special parts of the internet, like chum, that can’t help but reveal something profound in its peskiness. Better to appreciate it now, notice it now, and to critique it now, while it’s still here. While we can still see it, and talk to it. And while we can still think, in those few seconds they take to solve, about what, exactly, we’re proving.

So, CAPTCHA is dying. Here’s a video to remember it by.

https://medium.com/media/6828f42f84826aca5c5e349ce7c81477/href

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A Eulogy For CAPTCHA was originally published in The Awl on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

This thirsty gentleman thought he could help himself to a couple of cases of beer, but a smooth cashier thwarted his plans without breaking a sweat.

Defensive play of the year (@bethaniebob) (@drunkpeopledoingthings)

A post shared by Drunk People (@drunkpeopledoingthings) on Jun 22, 2017 at 7:38am PDT

[via drunkpeopledoingthings]

U.S. Girl Scouts as young as 5 years old will soon be able to earn their first-ever cybersecurity badges. 18 of these merit patches will be launched by the Girl Scouts of the USA starting in September, 2018.

(more…)

The newest editions of Choose Your Own Adventure books come with maps of the story structure that depicts all the branches, endings, and links of each story.

On the official maps, however, the endings aren’t coded in any way that reveals their nature. Instead, they operate according to a simple key: each arrow represents a page, each circle a choice, and each square an ending. Dotted lines show where branches link to one another.

Mapping the bones of the books can have other purposes, too. Nick Montfort, a poet and professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who studies interactive fiction, has a habit of asking people what they know about “Choose Your Own Adventure” books. “They often say, ‘You have two choices after every page,’” he says. “That’s not true. Sometimes you have one choice. Sometimes you have more than two. When you show the maps, you can see that these books don’t look exactly the same.”

(via @RLHeppner)

Tags: books   Choose Your Own Adventure   infoviz

This is a problem as I will be flying there shortly to visit my family.

Hoping it's just a software glitch on the Chicago Transit Authority station sign.

(via r/softwaregore)

Lynne Patton has no experience with housing policy, claims to have a law degree from a university that says she dropped out after two semesters, claims an affiliation with Yale that no one can explain, and is implicated in the Eric Trump charity scam that directed cash earmarked for children's cancer research into the Trump Organization's pockets -- and as of July 5, she'll oversee billions in spending in the New York housing authorities. On the plus side, she reportedly did a great job as Eric Trump's wedding-planner. (more…)

David Robinson used the data from the 28,657 people who self-selected to take the Stack Overflow survey to investigate the relationship between programmer pay and the conventions of using either tabs or spaces to mark indents, and found a persistent, significant correlation between using spaces and bringing home higher pay. (more…)

An upstanding citizen submitted this photo to Baltimore 311, the city's service request system.

(via DIGG)

His "prepared remarks" are already out, and tomorrow's the big show.

(more…)

The Biersafe Underground Beer Cooler is a plastic tube that holds 16 beer bottles. Buried around 3.5 feet deep, the surrounding dirt acts as insulation. It has an integrated bottle opener too.

(via Uncrate)

From The Fluff Society (@FluffSociety on Twitter), a superior cute-animals account.

Artist Jada Fitch creates impossibly cute bird feeders that attach to windows, allowing viewers to enjoy the sights of birds inside what looks like a tiny home. (more…)

Are you going to lose your job to a robot? This interactive website will tell you the percentage probability of automation.

In 2013 Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael A. Osborne published a report titled "The Future of Employment: How susceptible are jobs to computerisation?”. The authors examine how susceptible jobs are to computerisation, by implementing a novel methodology to estimate the probability of computerisation for 702 detailed occupations, using a Gaussian process classifier.

According to their estimates, about 47 percent of total US employment is at risk. Although the report is specific to the US job market, it is easy to see how this might apply all over the world.

We extracted the jobs and the probability of automation from the report and have made it easy to search for your job. We’ve added some additional information from the Bureau of Labor Statistics to provide some additional information about the jobs.

(/r/gifs)

24+ of the Republican lawmakers who voted yesterday to take away healthcare from tens of millions of Americans, including survivors of rape and domestic abuse are in vulnerable districts, having won their seats with less than 50% of the vote. (more…)

My friend Robert Dowling has turned snarking about art into, well, an art. On his Instagram Art Slut, he re-imagines the context for famous paintings, giving each one a distinctly modern flair. The posts all start with “TFW” for “That feeling when.” Here are some of my favorites:

https://www.instagram.com/p/BUHUr2xgfDL/ https://www.instagram.com/p/BT4QU2VgU9_/ https://www.instagram.com/p/BUZZdV8g-nK/ https://www.instagram.com/p/BTuANwEAgRZ/ https://www.instagram.com/p/BR8_E8_AhY8/ https://www.instagram.com/p/BUE-VYGAgst/ https://www.instagram.com/p/BS8puK2ggQC/ https://www.instagram.com/p/BTJYcs2goHP/ https://www.instagram.com/p/BTeaO8uAo4w/ https://www.instagram.com/p/BSOU3xFgJmx/ https://www.instagram.com/p/BSwmX7vAfCq/ https://www.instagram.com/p/BSyUkH3g9cp/

You can find more photos on Art Slut, and you can also follow Dowling on his personal Instagram right here.

Fox News and Reuters report that U.S. President Donald Trump has retained New York-based trial attorney Marc Kasowitz to defend him in the escalating federal investigations involving Russia, espionage suspicions, and possible criminal activities.

(more…)

Pemberton Music Festival is cancelled, but due to bankruptcy refunds will not automatically be issued to ticketholders, nor are they guaranteed to get the full amount they paid back.

Continue reading…

For 21 years, King Willem-Alexander has been flying unwitting commercial airlines passengers twice a month on the Dutch airline KLM. The 50 year old monarch says being a pilot is a "relaxing" hobby.

From Sky:

On staying incognito, he told De Telegraaf newspaper: "The advantage is that I can always say I am speaking on behalf of the captain and crew to welcome them on board, so I don't have to say my name.

"But then, most people don't listen anyway."

Propublica and Gizmodo sent a penetration-testing team to Mar-a-Lago, the Trump resort that has been at the center of series of controversial potential breaches of US military secrecy (for example, loudly discussing sensitive information about the North Korean missile launch in the club's full, public dining room); they discovered that it would be child's play to hack the Mar-a-Lago networks, and that indeed, the networks have almost certainly already been hacked. (more…)

Patriarch Kirill of the Russian Orthodox Church is a powerful reactionary figure in the country's toxic political scene, which has welded a tale of thwarted imperial destiny to a thin-skinned fundamentalist theology that can't bear the slightest sign of mockery; he's blamed ISIS on secularism and Pride parades and says that marriage equality literally heralds the imminent apocalypse. (more…)

"Huckleberry likes to sit on the roof," says Boing Boing reader Matthew. "His owners made a sign to reassure concerned passersby."

If you want a seat on an overbooked plane, access to a closed part of a museum, or to be able to convince a bouncer to let you into a packed club, adopt the ""kindly brontosaurus pose."

From Slate:

You must stand quietly and lean forward slightly, hands loosely clasped in a faintly prayerful arrangement. You will be in the gate agent’s peripheral vision—close enough that he can’t escape your presence, not so close that you’re crowding him—but you must keep your eyes fixed placidly on the agent’s face at all times. Assemble your features in an understanding, even beatific expression. Do not speak unless asked a question. Whenever the gate agent says anything, whether to you or other would-be passengers, you must nod empathically.

Continue as above until the gate agent gives you your seat number. The Kindly Brontosaurus always gets a seat number.

Why does it work?

“The body language of the Kindly Brontosaurus is respectful and nonthreatening,” [body language expert Dr. Lillian Glass says]. “There’s a humility, so you allow the other person to feel empowered. Since you’ve made them feel like king of the jungle, they’re more receptive to you.”

Early in the second set of 31-year-old Pablo Cuevas’s three-set quarterfinal win over young phenom Alexander Zverev in the Madrid Open, the veteran Uruguayan chased down a lob on the baseline and nailed this incredible no-look, crosscourt winner.

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