Peotician.com

Here is a stroke of genius for you… a professor of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University, Luis von Ahn (biglou), developed the CAPTCHA and now had developed the reCAPTCHA to help stop SPAM on the Web and digitize books. Have you ever filled out a form on the Internet and then had to type a word or phrase from a distorted image to submit the form? Well that distorted and annoying image of a word, phrase, or numbers is called a CAPTCHA. CAPTCHAs stop computers from filling out forms thousands of times automatically and help web developers detect a human submitting real information vs. a spammer using a script to create thousands of fake submissions. After inventing the CAPTCHA and realizing how much time we were actually wasting on these distorted annoying images, Luis von Ahn set out to do something productive with that time, digitize books. Here is what one looks like:

One of these words is known so it can be checked against what you typed in order to determine that you are human. The second word is not known and will be presented to many people and confirmed against all the responses to digitize a book and help assist an optical computer recognition program that couldn’t read the word or numbers and needs a little help from us humans. Very cool, very innovative and every webmaster should use this over any other CAPTCHA tool out there as it helps solve a problem and is very easy to integrate.

CAPTCHA = Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart

reCAPTCHA also helps protect your email address on the Web by forcing someone to answer a CAPTCHA before revealing the email address to a human instead of some computer spider seeking to send you SPAM. The program is called Mailhide and is also strongly recommended.

Luis was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship ( “genius award”) in 2006 and is the recipient of a Microsoft New Faculty Fellowship. He has also been named one of the 50 Best Brains in Science by Discover Magazine, and has made it to numerous recognition lists that include Popular Science Magazine’s Brilliant 10, Silicon.com’s 50 Most Influential People in Technology, and Technology Review’s TR35: Young Innovators Under 35. So basically he is a smart dude doing innovative things and helping to make the world better and more efficient.

Finally, his GWAP site uses games to tag images, sounds, videos, etc. to help search engines provide more accurate results with this new Web content and is worthwhile to look at as well.

The Tehran, Iran uprising this year after the disputed June presidential election sparked a new idea in future warfare. If you watched CNN or any other channel, you would have seen iReporters, Facebook posts, Tweets, and various other forms of communication coming out of Iran. The country quickly blocked access to sites in an effort to control communication coming out of the country. Iran can’t make up its mind as to whether or not it will block or unblock sites as it continues to exercise its power over its people’s freedom.

So on to the idea, if popular social networking sites can have such an impact in the media and enhance the power of the people in countries where the government attempts to suppress its people then why not consider communication warfare instead of traditional warfare? What if the United Nations had dropped supplies into Iran giving them more power to communicate? Supplies being computers, cell phones, digital cameras, video cameras, software, satellite Internet access that can’t be controlled by the country, and any other gear that could be used to increase communication and the voice of the people.

During the Iraq wars, those opposed to the war used the argument that the people don’t want the U.S. and others in their country and that may or may not be correct. So instead of dropping bombs in certain situations maybe we need to drop communications to empower the people so they can communicate what they want. Countries in wars have to take over all kinds of communications gear anyways, but ultimately we could keep soldiers and innocent people out of harm’s way and drop communications hardware instead of deploying deadly weapons.

I think it should also be said that this idea may only be part of a broader solution. When dealing with terrorists, modern tactics of deadly warfare may be required, but it would be nice to have some alternative ideas that could potentially help avoid a major war and the deaths or injuries that result.