Slashdot has an unusually interesting discussion on the rise and fall of CAPTCHAs, which is why I give that link precedence over the original story.

I mention this because I keep waiting for someone to discuss the root problem, and it's so rarely done that I guess I'm just going to have to do it myself. The root problem of spam comes from the following simple tension:

1. We want to be able to contact or be contacted by anybody.
2. We don't want to be contacted by just anybody.

Without understanding this fundamental dynamic, the whole "spam" situation won't make any sense.

One of the things I sometimes fiddle with in the back of my head is how to fix school curricula to better serve students and society. One of the stronger ideas I have is that economics (and ideally, game theory) should be taught, replacing a lot of really dumb mathematical holdovers like trigonometric identities for a semester or two.

And over the last few weeks, I've been really wishing that we'd been teaching economics for the past fifty years instead of other silly things, because the blinding stupidity on exhibit in the recent oil debates is really starting to get to me.

I can prove the News Media, or the "MSM" if you like, is not about news. I really do mean "prove". It's quite simple.

Markdown.

BBCode.

Uncountably many Wiki markups, all different.

reStructuredText.

Textile.

Pottymouth.

Who knows what I'm missing.

Please stop.

Sometimes in the middle of the night I get kind of stuck. Laying in bed, not quite awake, not totally asleep, kind of dreaming. And stuck on one particular subject, unable to change it and think/dream about anything else. - recently at Chizumatic

I'm sitting here wide awake at 4:15 am local time having just had this happen due to a bad combination of getting too cold while sleeping (always gives me annoyingly complicated dreams) and probably too much caffeine.

Will integrity issues be heating back up?

... probably not. It looks to me, based on the project page, that the vast majority of modifications come from local proxies the user is running, and the remainder is just on-the-fly image compression, which I am broadly not opposed to, as the human perception integrity is mostly maintained. (Not in favor of, mind you, but not opposed.)

In many modern languages, encoding errors are the number one cause of security flaws in software.

This is going to be long because if you don't have a deep understanding about what is going on, you too will write encoding-based security flaws. Given the widespread state of ignorance about this situation, including a large number of people who don't even believe there is a problem, I do not believe I can make this much shorter.

But before I can discuss any sort of solution, what exactly is the problem? Let us start with a parable.

One of the little games I play with my spam is waiting for their incredibly bad random name schemes to come up with a name I actually recognize. Today I've had the closest hit yet: "Charles Brown", who, tragically, has turned to the Nigerian scam to fund his kite habit.

Oh, kite-eating tree, how low you have brought him.

U.S. consumer prices were unexpectedly flat last month - Wall Street Journal

Is it just me, or is every bit of economic news lately being prefaced with "unexpectedly"?

Is it just me, or has prediction gotten noticeably harder in the last year or so? Maybe I'm just paying attention more, but you name the prediction from this time last year, from the state of Iraq, to the economy, to the domestic political situation, and not a one of them is even close.

If this article really demonstrates anything, it's the need for an independent press.

If you're dependent on the entities you are reporting on to get your news about those entities, you not independent. Levels of independence vary along a continuum, but most organizations are deep in "dependent" territory.

Commercial journalism has made its peace with this, because they get eyeballs whether they spend the money to pound the pavement, or just re-run press releases and report on what everybody else reports on. I see no way to fix this.