Cool trick to avoid spam without using CAPTCHA

It seems its not just me but quite a few people who are not too fond of CAPTCHA. Author of the post linked below has come up with a neat trick to avoid spam without using CAPTCHA. He makes use of the fact that humans are more intelligent than bots; but without asking the site visitor to recognize weird looking letters and enter them in a text field. Instead he creates a simple text field and makes it hidden using CSS, so to human eye it wont be visible but when a bot fills the form it would fill in this field too, as this field has been made invisible from CSS not HTML attribute. In the end he checks if this field has any value then ignores it as spam.

http://freecodesnippet.com/articles/security/preventing-spam-on-your-website-without-using-captcha/

Japanese auto giants collaborating to develop an OS

Japanese automakers and government are collaborating to develop an OS for automotive electronics. This initiative dubbed JASPAR (Japan Automotive Software Platform Architecture) includes Japanese auto giants Toyota, Honda, Nissan etc along with Toshiba and Economy, Trade and Industry Ministry. I am not sure if this OS is going to be open source or not but if it was they could have really used alot of help from seasoned OS programmers and probably complete it sooner. 

Steve Jobs and Bill Gates to make a joint appearance

Cant wait to see this. Steve Jobs and Bill Gates will be making a joint appearance at D: All Things Digital conference being held May 29 to 31, 2007 at the Four Seasons Resort Aviara, about 30 minutes north of San Diego. They say they will be discussing history and future of digital revolution.

An article at dowjones.com says

Both executives have made multiple individual appearances at the conference, which will celebrate its fifth anniversary this year, and is known as D5. But this will be their first joint session at D, and a highly unusual event.

This conference is an all-interview event organised by Wall Street Journal

Superman might not be real but Kryptonite is

Some geologists discovered a mineral in Serbia that has same chemical composition as Kryptonite, the infamous chemical in the famous Superman comic stories.

“We will have to be careful with it — we wouldn’t want to deprive Earth of its most famous superhero!,” said Dr Chris Stanley, a mineralogist at London’s Natural History Museum.

Stanley, who revealed the identity of the mysterious new mineral, discovered the match after searching the Internet for its chemical formula – sodium lithium boron silicate hydroxide.

Google is sponsoring 20 Drupal projects in Summer of Code 2007

In this years’s Summer of Code, among other projects, Google is sponsoring 20 projects of Drupal, a very popular open source content mangement system. Financial value of this contibution is said to be $100,000. This is a really interesting way to contribute to open source projects.

The crazy boss Hall of Fame

Think your boss is crazy, read this. News.com’s Michael Kanellos publishes his crazy boss hall of fame list. He writes -

… which brings up the unanticipated side effect of nutty supervisors: they are often very effective. Thus, to be in the Hall of Fame, they can’t just be crazy. Like Highlights magazine, they have to be crazy “with a purpose.” …

Google asks you to swim across Atlnatic to get to Paris from NY

I came across this article on Newsvine. Its really funny. Try going to maps.google.com and get directions from New York,NY to Paris, France. It does give you directions and in the map it shows the highlighted path through Atlantic Ocean. I was wondering what mode of transportation would it suggest to travel transatalantic. I thought it might ask to go to EWR or JFK and fly, but it didnt. To my surprise it asked me to go to somewhere near Boston and swim across the Atlantic Ocean, 3462 miles, to get to Paris.  

Even hackers(bad ones) offer subscription and support for their malware

Its not just antivirus or other legitimate software companies that offer subscription and support for their software. Even malware, trojan writers have adopted this business modal. Its really amazing how sophisticated they are getting in terms of doing business.

http://www.computerworld.com.au/index.php/id;838771320;fp;16;fpid;0

Where did spam that you just recieved originate? Probably some big corporation

Security fix analysed spam samples collected last month and found that many of them originated from computers on networks of big corporations like Oracle, HP, ExxonMobil, Home Depot, Electronic Arts and Dow Jones to name a few. Some of these machines are even listed in Spamhaus.org’s “Exploit Block List” (XBL).

Open Office 2.2 released

One of my favourate open source projects, Open Office, realeased version 2.2 today. Enhancements include better text display and enhanced pivot tables. Recently they had also added VBA macros to calc (excel equivalent). It seems development of this project is catching good speed.

 It can be downloaded from http://www.openoffice.org/