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CyberArtisans Web Developers Newsletter |  |
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Welcome to the August 2008 issue of the CyberArtisans newsletter! Each month we try to present information that will be useful to you as a website owner and as a user of the web. If these newsletters are useful, please forward this to a friend. To unsubscribe, follow the directions at the bottom of this email.
You see this a lot online now — you are registering for some website and they ask you to type in a couple of words that are displayed in a way that is difficult to read. If you ask, they will tell you that this is to ensure that only humans log in to the site rather web robots (sometimes known as "bots") that are simply collecting data for Spammers. But it turns out that sometimes you are doing a lot more. As you may have heard, many organizations (including Google) are scanning old books to convert them into online files that can be read over the web. All this is done by optical character Reader (OCR) software, but sometimes the OCR software can't decipher a piece of smudged text. The obvious solution is to pay people to decipher this text, but (a) this is expensive, and (b) there is a lot of undeciphered text out there since thousands of pages are being read by OCR software every day. So somebody decided to connect these two functions. If you are asked to type more than one word for a web registration, chances are only one of those words is for security. The other is a word that an OCR system couldn't decipher. Your interpretation of it, along with thousands of others, is used to decipher some book correctly. One advantage of this system is that, by using thousands of decipherers, the computer folks are taking advantage of an interesting phenomenon — apparently groups of people make consistently better decisions than any one member of a group does. This has been used in the past by Cloudmark, which makes a Spam filter that is controlled by the votes of its users. To read the full story of how you may be helping decipher old books for the Internet, see this article in the Boston Globe.
So your hard drive died and you don't have a backup. You call the various hard drive recovery folks and they say it could cost between $500 and $2,000 to recover your data. And of course they can't tell you what the real price is until they see your drive. How about doing it yourself? We really, REALLY, don't recommend you try this, but if you have more time than money, enjoy tinkering with tiny parts and electronics, and are willing to bet your data on your tinkering abilities, take a look at this YouTube video. This is the first part of a 5-part video of a presentation given by Scott Moulton at DEFCON 15. (DEFCON is otherwise known as the Hacker's Conference. It's interesting to note that on their FAQ page, under the question "Is there a free network at DEFCON?" the answer is "Yes. It would be fair to describe the network as 'hostile'. It has been described as 'the worlds most hostile network', but such descriptions are just attempts at flattery.") The video is probably most useful for explaining why hard drive recovery is so expensive. Most people, including many technical people, have little appreciation for how complex the internal structure of their hard drive is and how difficult it is to sort that out if the drive is damaged. If nothing else, it will make you feel much better about paying the price of recovering your data. Fortunately, most hard drive problems are relatively simple and don't require clean-room disassembly or similar drastic (and expensive) measures. That's why we recommend first asking your favorite computer guru if he/she has drive recovery software. If the problem is relatively simple, drive recovery software in the hands of an experienced computer technician can recover most if not all of your data for a few hundred dollars. Contact us if you need a referral to a good computer guru. The one piece of advice all data recovery people will give you is that if you suspect that you have a hard drive problem, leave your system off until a skilled technician has a chance to look at it. Repeated amateur attempts at recovery may complicate or even prevent the recovery of your data.
Google has just announced that it will release a browser, called "Chrome," this week. This is only a week after Microsoft released a beta of its Internet Explorer 8. This release will be Windows only. There will be later releases for the Mac and Linux. Needless to say, many people are watching this with interest. Microsoft is concerned about a threat to Internet Explorer's position as the leading browser (about 75% of users). Google is concerned because Microsoft's IE8 showed that MS is trying to make it more difficult to use Google as the primary search engine. Mozilla is concerned about the market share of its Firefox browser. Just to complicate the issue, Google has been assisting Mozilla (which is non-profit) with the Firefox browser and recently signed an agreement to continue that assistance through 2011. The only thing we can say with complete confidence is that this will be interesting. Stay tuned. Note: Just before this was sent out we noticed that there is a review of Google's new browser, along with a review of IE8, in the Wall Street Journal's technology pages. You can view this article without a wsj.com subscription.
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