Remember “those old American Express commercials”:http://youtube.com/watch?v=ABwy2nFh1Vo&search=american%20express created by “Ogilvy and Mather”:http://www.ogilvy.com, ‘Don’t leave home without it?’ Well the same could be said about those identity checkers you see on blogs and websites, otherwise known as captchas. Captcha? Did somebody sneeze?
In all seriousness, thanks to “Mitch Joel”:http://www.onedegree.ca/category/mitch-joel for telling me the proper name. (It looks so much more professional when speaking to the IT department and saying ‘Please implement a captcha for our upcoming viral contest’ as opposed to ‘Can you put in one of those identity checker thing-a-majiggers into our online form.’)
Actually, “CAPTCHA”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Captcha stands for “Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart”.
The short version is that it prevents hackers, scam artists and other filthy mcnasties out there from easily running bots or scripts on online services. Whether it be completing online registration forms for web-based emails so they can spam you later or targeting online contests so they can stack the odds of winning in their favour.
This CAPTCHA of “smwm” obscures its message from computer interpretation by twisting the letters and adding a background color gradient.
Category: Sulemaan Ahmed
At risk of dating myself, I remember when my friend got this thing called an Atari and everyone in the neighbourhood flocked to his house to play this game where you got chased by ghosts and ate magic energy pellets.
From ‘Moon Lander’ for the Vic 20, ‘Choplifter’ for the Apple IIE, all the way to the current ‘Halo’ series for the Xbox 360 – the quality of video games has progressed at a ferocious rate. NHL 2006 by Electronic Arts is so realistic one could easily confuse it with Hockey Night in Canada. Was I playing the Tom Clancy Rainbow 6 series by Ubisoft or watching the fine programming at Fox News again? The lines are definitely getting blurred.
Some video games have become so addictive they have been mentioned as a cause of unemployment, poor performance in school, and even a contributory factor of “divorce”:http://www.gameinfowire.com/news.asp?nid=4600 in the United Kingdom.
Given that video games are no longer limited to young children, enthusiasts are spending more time on them than television. So it was inevitable that in-game advertising became part of the video game landscape.
A couple of months ago, I was introduced to “LinkedIn”:http://www.linkedin.com and I must agree with “Mitch Joel”:http://www.twistimage.com/blog/archives/000547.html that this is a very useful online tool.
Just last night I had dinner with an “old university buddy”:http://ac.micro.org/wp I lost touch with 13 years ago. We reconnected courtesy of LinkedIn. (No, I am not on their payroll nor have I been offered any compensation from them.)
However, a colleague of mine had a complaint. She asked me not to include her name so let’s call her ‘Gertrude’. Gertrude recently connected with someone but while her new connection could see her contact list, she was blocked from seeing theirs. Gertrude thought this was rather selfish.