We humans use some pretty odd things as medicines – penicillin is a form of fruit mold, after all. But sometimes the origins and other uses of a substance get in the way of objective scientific study of its effects – the marijuana debate being a prime example. That said, mold and resinous plants are fairly innocuous when compared to the
original source of a new weight-loss drug for diabetics – gila monster saliva.
Spammers Defeat CAPTCHA?
In the war between spammers and everyone else, the spammers may have captured new territory. A new trojan appears to be capable of bypassing the CAPTCHA systems on Yahoo and Hotmail, allowing spammers to create 500 bogus email addresses per hour. CAPTCHA tests are the distorted images of text that computers have previously been unable to read. They’re a kind of simple Turing Test meant to require a human behind a keyboard when creating a new email address.
I am suspicious of the claim that the trojan is actually somehow able to read these images, which have thus far been impossible to crack as a security measure. New Scientist Blog agrees. 500 an hour is not very fast. There is some trickery at work here, perhaps in the form of passing the CAPTCHAs from Hotmail to another website where humans are doing the solving work for the spammers.
Jay Lake’s New Novel
Past Futurismic contributor Jay Lake has just published “Mainspring,” a novel about the gears of the universe, the Archangel Gabriel, and a clockmaker’s apprentice. I haven’t read it yet, but knowing Jay’s penchant for the inventive and his storyteller’s intuition, I’m sure I’ll like it. If you’ve read it, let us know what you think in the comments. [boingboing]
Could Bigelow’s inflatables replace the International Space Station?
Bigelow Aerospace is certainly on a roll with their inflatable orbital module projects, demonstrating that you don’t need a vast Federal budget to get functional capsules into space. Colony Worlds suggests that such low-tech success stories will erode political support for the ISS, which will become increasingly hard to maintain once the Space Shuttle is retired. Will this be the tipping point for the commercial space industry?
First steps for open source Second Life
If there’s one thing that everyone (even the most enthusiastic) has to say about Second Life, it’s that the software is ferociously resource-hungry and more bug-ridden than a hobo’s sleeping bag. Numerous projects are running toward the goal of a more user-friendly interface based on open source code, and one of them has just become the darling of the SL blogosphere by creating an AJAX-based text-only version of the client software – in non-geek language, that means it can run in your web browser. Which is pretty good going for a fifteen year old.