I had a chance to meet and listen to a CMU professor Luis von Ahn last Friday. He along with Manuel Blum invented concept of CAPTCHA on internet. Captcha is scribbled text image used along with the web forms, which makes it difficult for software to mimic human responses. He is doing some great job with gwap.com and has already done something known as reCAPTCHA (which I would delve a bit to explain my point here)
Concept behind reCAPTCHA is same as that of CAPTCHA but here, information collected from the user on internet is captured and utilized to digitize books. (read more about it here), a very novel way of utilizing micro human cycles, which when put together can be equal to many work years worth.
If you had already read about reCAPTCHA, its making software learn how to read scribbled texts and ultimately make it so intelligent that software can read correctly an old yellowish New York Times maybe from 1900s. Did it rang any bells, yet?
If captcha is a success because of current state of software’s incapabilities to read scribbled, not so readable text, by virtue of reCAPTCHA (side effect), software would be intelligent enough to read them and hence devaluing all the goodness captcha brings in, in my own lifetime.
We axed our own leg.
Another great example which motivated me to write this post is Anatomy of Twitter Attack which details about how hacker leveraged information so readily available on the social networking site and used his social engineering skills to guess passwords and compromise a service used by millions of people in the world.
We made some great sites, and than social media sites and then added search on it and boom!. All your information is available for a bad guy, just google it. We solved a problem of getting connected with family and friends but then we made an opening (a huge one) for hackers to get all this information for his benefits.
I am only relieved with the fact that likes of Luis would always certainly come up with a better solution poised in front of us at that point of time.