CAPTCHA and the Next Generation.

If Ray Kurzweil is to be believed (and I for one subscribe to his core hypothesis) we should at some point in the not-too-distant future (say within 10 years) bear witness to the birth of the next generation of life on this planet.

I don't really mean anything as outrageous as robots storming Parliament or the White House. The coming Singularity will arrive in a series of jumps, or shifts. In the past, these jumps, or bullet points in history, have been notable as things like the adoption of language. Once language had established itself, we evolved to the stage where language could be visually recorded. Then came the ability to record the sound of language itself. Not long after this, we invented computers. Very shortly after this, the Internet blossomed into existence allowing the completely free, global exchange of pretty much any kind of information, including written and spoken language as well as the more recent incarnations of communication, photographs and moving images.

The communication explosion is upon us. There is a global community out there ravenously feeding itself with the writings, images, sounds and movies of countless millions of people. Cultural mashups are already happening, enabled by the thrust of this new technology. But where are the changes that are necessary to allow this explosion to accelerate toward the next step?

The changes are already happening. One example of this is the recent cracking of the CAPTCHA test we all know and hate which is necessary to prevent the automatic creation of email and other online accounts by computers.

Previously, any web site which had a 'Register' page was vulnerable to attack by another computer which would visit the page and 'make up' a whole profile, complete with name, email address and other information which would then be used by the attacking computer(s) to advertise goods or services on the victim site's message boards, forums or through email or personal messaging, all using the freshly created fake profile.

To combat this practice, the CAPTCHA test was created. This test — which often presents users with difficult to read sequences of letters and asks for these letters to be entered with the registration information — is to allow the site to differentiate between a computer trying to create an account and a real person trying to create an account. The test works because computers aren't very good at converting the image into text, whereas humans are very good at recognising these patterns and pass the test with relative ease. This test, therefore, prevents computers from registering for many thousands of email accounts every day.

However, the news that a group of hackers has beaten the CAPTCHA system on Google's Gmail registration page is — as well as potentially being both a security and privacy threat — one example of how the Internet is getting more intelligent, even if at the moment that intelligence still comes from people.

However, consider that with the breaking of CAPTCHA, the technology now clearly exists to allow computers to read text in images very easily, even when it is somewhat scrambled as in these tests. Marry that software technology to a database of images (say Google images, which is itself a text-based image search engine, or Microsoft's unbelievable Photosynth web-based image processing application) and you have a level of cross-referencing and machine-based semantic processing way above anything we have now.

Of course, we've had text recognition software for a while now. Number plate recognition and OCR systems to read cheques and other machine-readable stationery have been around for many years. The difference is that now, any computer connected to the World Wide Web has access not only to images, but increasingly the means to understand the images and the text based content of them. It is easy to imagine a computer algorithm refining itself by learning from images scraped from the Web, bypassing the need for the algorithm to be refined by a human programmer.

This is just a small step, but how long will it be before people lose touch with exactly how this process works? I know that these processes are some way above my ability to understand them. The complex network of friends, applications and connections hosted by Facebook is utterly beyond me, maybe even partially beyond Facebook themselves as it seems to be quite difficult to completely remove any one user from its database, just as it seems to be difficult to remove a single memory from a human mind.

The algorithms involved in grouping people and applications or words and images in such a way as to contextualise them are difficult problems and I believe that, at some point, the very people who laid the foundations of the systems which are solving these problems will learn to rely on the systems, rather than create them.

At that point, we relinquish a level of control of the Internet to machines. Grandiose that may sound, but — even if at a subtle and seemingly unimportant level — the changes are happening. A lot of information is already on the web and I for one know that I rely on the web as well as my own skill set and memory to live my life and do my job. The line between the Internet and us is blurring on many levels at an increasing rate. In 1990, we had just about perfected the ability to view a web page with static information on it. In 2008, just 18 years later, we can organise large events. The September 11th attacks were largely believed to have been organised — at least in part — using the Internet and its various services. Just over 6 years on and the Web is already a level ahead of what was available then. YouTube, MySpace, Facebook and the explosion of online social media had not yet taken off when the planes hit the Twin Towers of the New York World Trade Centre.

We are in the middle of a fantastic age of information, technology and communication.

Hopefully, something wonderful will happen to us through its global adoption.

YouTube outage. So..?

Well, YouTube's problems on Sunday seem to me to be one of the symptoms of the times.

Whether politically-based or not, the re-routing of traffic away from YouTube by Pakistani ISPs was a small-minded move in my opinion. The internet is not something you can have bits of. You can't order it like a pizza and pick off the jalapeños. You buy into it or not.

One way of looking at this is a kind of cultural test of your nation's tolerance. If you're not happy being part of the rest of the world, you are going to have problems in the future and as the web becomes ever more prevalent these problems are going to get a lot, lot worse.

I'm not sure what the solution is. If I knew that, I probably wouldn't be sitting here writing this but I do know that this situation cannot be ignored. At some point either the Pakistani authorities must accept the Internet and the global opinions that go with it (blasphemous content and all) or it must cut itself off from it and carry on alone.

However, I'm eager to know how YouTube will deal with this. I'll be a bit disappointed if they lower themselves to the level of people who order a pizza and then complain about the peppers. The only thing they really need to do is strengthen their 'bit' (pardon the pun) of the internet to ensure this doesn't happen again, however that may be achieved. The Pakistani Government — in this case — just need to be managed rather than confronted with threats of legal or other action. A bit of tolerance on both sides here would go a long way towards keeping our global culture stable and constructive.

As I've mentioned in previous posts, this planet has never in its history been in quite the situation it is now. The globalisation of culture may prove to be a dangerous thing.

Policy. Language. Economy. Copyright law. National security. Religion. The fundamentals of life in every country — indeed for each and every individual — need to be taken into consideration and the only way forward is not confrontation, blame or denial; more an opportunity to realistically assess the genuine needs of the individuals, corporations and governments the world over.

The balance of power in the Middle East will be very tightly fought and I think the Internet will be the prime catalyst in forcing the situation to a head. It's not going to be easy. I think there are difficult decisions ahead but I believe that we are living in exciting times and I would not want to live in any other.

Microphones and Snare Drums

I recently took delivery of a new PDP birch snare drum from a friend who has upgraded his kit. He now has something very new and very nice, a Chad Smith signature thing which — of course — I'm itching to hear but this means a whole new sound to my kit which I have been eager to record. The weekend gone gave me just such an opportunity when a young lady friend of mine and a guitarist/bassist friend wanted to cover the KT Tunstall song, Heal Over.

I saw an opportunity to hear my new snare so jumped at the chance to play kit for them and I have to say I'm ever more impressed with my ability to mic a snare drum. All I need now is the ability to mic the rest of the kit just as well and I'm laughing. My main problem right now is that the snare — which I need to be very sensitive — is activating in sympathy with the toms when I play them and the effect is very noticeable as I have miced the snare side of the drum to pick up that breathy sound which I like so much on Donald Fagen's "Brite Nitegown", courtesy of the outrageously talented Keith Carlock.

I know I'm never going to achieve such a standard but I have to say the new snare is a move in the right direction.

I'd like at some point to set up a website with recordings of this stuff to let people listen to and critique. I've searched mostly in vain for detailed hints and tips on mic placement and if I can get my ass into gear I'd love to put everything I've learned about this experience up onto the web for all to either learn from, build upon or criticise.

Suffice to say that Messrs Fagen and Carlock (and anyone else who puts genuine feel and passion into their productions) have a lot to teach but that, as with all music, it's there to hear and learn from if you choose to listen.

Here's to more and better mics and more time to put them to good use!

The Deal with Piracy

What is the big deal with people downloading music for free? Is it stealing? What — really — is the issue?

Consider that the entity that stands to make the most money out of terrorising children into paying for a CD are the corporations who represent the artists. The artists aren't into that kind of negative publicity. I don't think a genuine musician would inflict the threat of court, fines, the inherent stress and hassle of judicial action on anyone, and the shops are doing their best to trust the corporations but their patience will only last for so long.

While I'm not a professional (as such. Except for the odd free round at the pub) I would like to think that if I was capable of producing large quantities of music that people wanted to listen to, I would certainly not be looking for an agent, publisher or distributor in this day and age.

They are an anachronism and we'd be better off without them.

I have the knowledge to produce a short run of CDs, encode some medium quality 'taster' tracks and put my own site together, maybe set up stores on some of the better known websites. I'd work the system that is currently in place, just the same as the distributors and publishers did fifty years ago and more.

I do not have a problem with the illegal downloading of copyrighted music from any of the available sources online.

Certainly one illustration of this is that my current (bought) CD collection contains a lot of music which I had 'previewed' online, because it was free. I have discovered a wider musical taste within myself as a direct result of the technology, and that suits me.

As a result, I have spent money on CDs where I might previously have not.

I think it's about time that the companies who 'represent' (read: rip off) the genuine artists in this world stop bitching about how the rest of the world overtook them. If these people were doing their job properly and weren't so far removed from the people they were pretending to serve, they would have spotted this revolution years ago and maybe invested in an ISP or bought into the technology to allow them to make the most of the situation they are now so publicly feeling sorry for themselves for.

It is low to blame the world for a mistake made with other people's livelihoods years ago, when it would have been more profitable for all concerned to have done something about it then.

Professional musician Benn Jordan was interviewed by Torrent Freak. Read his account of the current climate here.

Iran. No Internet. No Coincidence?

IF:

• You were a large government and fancied an enforced occupation of an overseas country — a country you suspected or were sure had nuclear capabilities — and you knew that communication to and from that country would complicate your mission;
• You had already attempted to inhibit communications to and from that country by for example denying them access to publicly available technologies such as email;
• Had the ability to — in one easy stroke — sever that country's most valuable communications connection to the rest of the world;

How would you do it?

The next war may have already started. The first step in making a move is to ensure that the news of the invasion and its consequences for the people are not broadcast for all the world to see.

Or maybe the fact that the cable that supplied the Internet to this country severed itself, completely by accident. Maybe a big shark bit it. Maybe a big shark bit all three...

I hope I'm just being paranoid...

...

FCC Auctions. Google for the win?

The chances of Google ending up with a significant win from the FCC wireless spectrum auctions are pretty high, especially with the news that Microsoft are making serious advances on Yahoo!

If Microsoft acquires (or at least gains a controlling interest in) Yahoo!, this will distill the conditions for the next round in the never-ending fight for global supremacy in the Internet wars.

Let's face it, installed operating systems (Vista, XP, Linux Ubuntu et al) are becoming largely transparent and increasingly being used to run online applications rather than enjoying the privilege of running local installations of these applications. While there is still room in the market for offline, local apps, this won't last forever. Software as a service (SaaS) is the way forward, certainly for enterprise level software the likes of which Microsoft currently produces.

I have wondered, though, why Microsoft didn't capitalise on this idea many years ago when they pioneered (or should that be 'marketed') the concept of webmail with their infamous Hotmail. Maybe if they'd carried on down this road, they would now have a brace of online applications themselves and would be well above competition from the likes of Google. We could have been using online versions of Word, Excel or Powerpoint by now.

The fact is that Microsoft tend to keep their products and ideas up to date by doing the absolute minimum, often waiting for a threat to arise before doing something about it. Look at the history between Netscape and Explorer and more recently Firefox and Explorer. It could be very persuasively argued that Explorer is only the success that it is simply because it came bundled with the dominant operating system of the time.

I believe the same is true of online applications. Their recent approach to Yahoo! strongly suggests that they are not afraid of a face off with Google.

However, Google may well have its own ideas about where the market is heading next. From the off, they claimed that they would pitch in with a 4.6 billion dollar bid for a portion of the wireless spectrum auctioned off by the FCC, even cheekily laying down conditions about the eventual use of the spectrum to the FCC in exchange for a promise to bid.

It looks as if these two giants will still find room to avoid each other for a while yet, if Google wins the spectrum and Microsoft acquire Yahoo!

Google powered mobile devices running Google and Microsoft/Yahoo! applications.

Where will it all end...