02/27/2013 Weekly Tech Article

R.I.P. CAPTCHA

• Say good-bye to CAPTCHA, the boxes of warped text that separate humans from bots online. Al company Vicarious claims to have developed an algorithm that can pass the test about 90 percent of the time. What will save us from spam now? These alternatives could come to a site near you:
• Two-step verification: validate your user name with a confirmation code sent to your phone or e-mail.
• Games: solve puzzles, draw shapes, or describe pictures.
• Timers: if a form is filled out and submitted faster than is humanly possible, the bot is denied access.
• Honeypot: programming hidden to humans but visible to bots tricks a nefarious algorithm into identifying itself and eventually blocks it.
• Motion: using a device's camera, a program analyzes gestures to determine whether you're flesh and blood.
• http://www.popsci.com/article/technology/rip-captcha?dom=PSC&loc=recent&lnk=1&con=rip-captcha

02/14/2013 Weekly Tech Article

Olympic Ring Fails Spectacularly During Sochi Opening Ceremony

• Sochi has been fraught with problems in the days leading up to the Olympics, but no one issue has been quite so telling of Russia's hosting struggles as a malfunction at its opening ceremony that lead to an incomplete set of Olympics rings going up on display. While the ceremony was supposed to feature all five rings growing from small snowflakes into the Olympic logo's five intersecting circles, the top-right ring failed to expand alongside the others, leaving four circles beside what looked almost like an asterisk. Although that may have been a glaring mistake in the ceremony, the overall show was very well executed and quite impressive.
• http://www.theverge.com/2014/2/7/5390152/olympic-ring-malfunction-sochi-opening-ceremony

02/07/2013 Weekly Tech Article

Finally, A Super-Simple Modular Robotics Kit

• The robot of the popular imagination, whether it's R2D2 or Rosie, just works. But in reality, making a robot just work takes a lot of hard work. Many would-be roboticists give up when faced with a soldering iron, an Arduino board, and lines of code. The EZ-Robot kits make constructing and coding modular, so anyone can build a custom bot in 30 mins or less.
• Builders assemble their EZ-Robots physically and digitally. They attach motors and appendages to a controller board that contains a processor and a Wi-Fi radio. Alongside their creation, users configure their robot with the Wi-Fi. Advanced users can code their own robotic quirks and even download plans to 3-D print custom appendages for specific tasks. After all, who wouldn't like a personal snow shoveler in February?
• http://www.popsci.com/article/gadgets/finally-super-simple-modular-robotics-kit?dom=PSC&loc=recent&lnk=9&con=finally-a-supersimple-modular-robotics-kit