Apparently Tivo is going to open up the system to third-party development. Very interesting.

Casey Chesnut used a neural network to defeat comment-spam CAPTCHAs and used his software to auto-post a polite “Sorry, you've been 0wned, here's how I did it” comment on 90+ blogs. Apparently, some people have their comment system linked to hairs up their asses and Furor Has Erupted (tm). “He proved nothing! Everyone knew that this could be done!” Say some. Ummm... not so much. Recognition of pixel-based distorted shapes against a noisy background is not trivial (he says, being a guy who has reason to believe the U.S. is still using some neural net code of his in the latest generation of mumble-mumble-mumbles).

Neural nets, like most AI techniques, are easy to overestimate. A solution based on neural nets always involves creative preprocessing and an error-prone training and refinement process. Casey proved that it was relatively easy to extract trainable features from a particular, but fairly representative, CAPTCHA implementation. (Note to Casey critics: background grids would be trivial to preprocess out.) That seems absolutely praise-worthy to me.

Did he need to post to 90 blogs to prove his point? Nope. Is what he did unethical? Nope. At most, it was rude and I'm not even sure about that (I don't know who he posted to, but it certainly wouldn't be rude to anyone who had blogged about CAPTCHAs or AI or image recognition).

Keep going, Casey! Hey, why don't you take on continual speech recognition in noisy environments next? Everyone knows it can be done!

So there I am, all smug in my 99 Nerd Score and along comes a guy who builds an Apollo Guidance Computer in his basement. Not a software simulator, mind you (a nerdy exercise I can at least imagine), but an actual wire-wrapped reproduction. I am but a smudge of Dorito dust on the fingers of His Glorious Nerd Majesty.

Now, there is one way that I can maintain the self-esteem that is essential to a nerd lifestyle, which is to boast of my engagement in nerdy sports like Frisbee and SCUBA diving. Most geekily, recently I've been working on being able to hold my breath for a really, really long time, a "sport" where high perfomance relies on not moving.

Spent the weekend getting my butt kicked in a Frisbee Golf Tournament over on the Hilo side. Camped at the gorgeous Mackenzie State Park, where the first two rounds were played in a very tight, forested course (the only two holes that weren't through trees were over the water). Yesterday the tournament moved to Wailoa State Park in Hilo, which was much more open, but had great water hazards (100 yards over the water, island holes, etc.). I much preferred the Wailoa course, since (a) I'm a strong thrower but unused to golf discs, so I had no touch working through the trees, and (b) I can't stand the “thunk” of a clean disc smacking into a tree at full speed.

Very nice group of people, including some travelling pros (yes, people travel to throw Frisbee golf). To me, though, the actual highlight of the weekend was a humpback that swam by no more than 100 yards offshore at Mackenzie.

Hilo was gorgeous yesterday. It gets a bad rap because it's rainier than Kailua Kona, but it's a really great town.

Airbus has unveiled the A380, the biggest freakin' passenger jet evah (261' 10” wingspan. Yoiks.) Here are some images. There's been lots of talk about how the plane will have casinos and gyms and various other fun things. Sure. It's not like any airline would be so heartless as to configure 840 seats with 31 inches of pitch.

So there I am, all smug in my 99 Nerd Score and along comes a guy who builds an Apollo Guidance Computer in his basement. Not a software simulator, mind you (a nerdy exercise I can at least imagine), but an actual wire-wrapped reproduction. I am but a smudge of Dorito dust on the fingers of His Glorious Nerd Majesty.

Now, there is one way that I can recover high nerd cred, which is that I engage in nerdy sports like Frisbee and SCUBA diving. Most geekily, recently I've been working on being able to hold my breath for a really, really long time, a "sport" where high perfomance relies on not moving.

My wife is a fine artist (oil painting). She tells me that a huge thing in the art market right now is galleries specializing in Russian art, usually selling canvases in the $20-50K price range. Not because there's an important movement coming out of Russia, but because the galleries are paying artists 10% of the sales price! Tina was talking to an acquaintence who used to work in such a gallery who said “Well, $2000 is a lot of money in Russia.”

Insanity now reigns over the entire spectrum of the art market, from the highest end to the “hand highlighted” canvasses of Kincade to... well, the bottom end of the art market is actually the most genuine, since it's the place where people honestly strive to express themselves and people buy individual pieces because they want to live with them.

Scoble has quashed the rumor of a Microsoft-branded Tablet PC that I linked to and discounted yesterday.

I don’t believe it. The consequences of Microsoft getting into the system hardware space would be so seismic that I just can’t believe they’d do it. Now, a Microsoft digital pen a la the Io, I’d believe in a second. I’d even believe Microsoft subsidizing a digitizer manufacturer or the Tablet OEMs for price control. But a complete system? I just can’t imagine them crossing the Rubicon.

In a great interview on Gizmodo, Bill Gates and Joel Johnson (?) squabble about DRM. Despite his disclaimer that he was intimidated, the interviewer challenges Gates boldly. Gates responds (in part), by saying that you have to start from the question "'should there be confidential information?'" (such as for medical records) and when the interviewer accuses him of shifting the argument, Gates says "It's not different. It's identical technology. It's the same bits!"

Which gives me the opportunity to point out that post-Longhorn and especially post-Palladium, the premise that computers will always have a "bits is bits" loophole, for better or worse, will no longer hold. The idea that a computer's memory could be composed of homogeneous bits whose interpretation was dependent on context was one of the elegant innovations in the Univac, whose architecture was described by Jon von Neumann. The "von Neumann architecture," became virtually universal by the 1970s but it's not "fundamental" to the concept of computers.

The abstract virtual machines of managed platforms such as .NET and Java do not have homogenous bits that can be interpreted as arbitrary types of data or machine instructions or what have you. True, these abstract VMs are implemented on top of chips that are essentially von Neumann, so there's still a "bits is bits" loophole today. With a sufficiently instrumented machine today, you can still view any piece of main memory on your system, allowing you to compromise (for better or worse) anything that executes within the context of your operating system.

In Longhorn, large portions of the OS are going to migrate from native code to managed code, making it far more difficult to access and interpret the native bits and bytes present in memory (of course, within the virtual machines, there are powerful debugging tools, but these do not generally provide insight into the underyling physical memory).

Finally, the Next-Generation Secure Computing Base fully closes the "bits is bits" loophole. The NGSCB provides a combination of hardware and software that makes it possible to create fully secure data pathways, essentially black boxes within your system architecture. Such black boxes could be used to transform encrypted data into a usable form. This could be incorporated at the level of media drivers (sound, video) although doing so would introduce a considerable performance penalty. But between Moore's Law, the RIAA, and the MPAA, it's not at all inconceivable.

Such a system would still have an "analog loophole" in that once transformed for playback, one should be able to intercept and record the bits perfectly. However, this might require specialized drivers or even hardware (depending on how far along the media playback pipeline the NGSCB transforms are incorporated).

Contrary to Gates' assertion, DRM is not a context-free technology that applies equally to all bits. It is entirely likely that DRM advocates will push for design decisions and commitments from commercial OS vendors that make opague large, complex subsystems in computer systems.

Introducing COmega is a good overview of what is probably the most obviously startling thing about COmega -- it's attempt to bridge XML / Object / Relational worlds with built-in syntax. I'm not sure that this is going to be COmega's biggest contribution to the mainstream (I suspect that it's threading techniques using “chords” may prove to be more important), but it's certainly interesting. Dare promises to visit E4X, which combines XML handling with JavaScript and is, in my opinion, a better match for many XML processing scenarios, in his next article.

Through this weekend, you can get a free copy of Graphics Server .NET: Widgets Edition

To get your free copy (download only - physical product available for just the shipping charge) just go through our order process.  Offer good through January 16, 2005.

Via [Johnson's Chart Component Blog]

Ah hah! No leading / on the FTP Path: www/knowing.net/images