A CAPTCHA is a type of challenge-response test used in computing to ensure that the response is not generated by a computer. The process usually involves one computer (a server) asking a user to complete a simple test which the computer is able to generate and grade. Because other computers are unable to solve the CAPTCHA, any user entering a correct solution is presumed to be human. (via Wikipedia)

I really do consider myself an intelligent human being yet despite my own personal beliefs other websites simply don’t agree. For a long time I’ve struggled with CAPTCHA’s implemented on websites. Either I’m really dumb or the technology is flawed – I lean towards to later.

Let’s look at my latest example. Last night I went to Register.com to look for available domain names. Now I normally use GoDaddy for domain name squatting hunting but alas the last few days their search results have not been working properly so I decided to use the other giant.

When I tried to access the WHOIS details for a particular domain I was presented with a CAPTCHA – I guess in an effort to determine if I was a robot or a real human being – but after twenty unsuccessful attempts I simply had to give up the challenge-response test and succumb to the notion that I must be a robot/spammer/computer and not human after all.

After the first ten or so failures I decided to screenshot all my responses to the CAPTCHA images presented to me because I have to prove to myself that I am not a robot by getting your help on the matter. Here are my results.

Please can someone tell me where I went wrong…….?

The net-result is that Register.com will not be seeing any of my money any time soon and I can’t tell you how often this exact thing happens with CAPTCHA. I realise why a site like Register.com uses it, GoDaddy uses it too, but surely it could be easier for real people to pass the challenge-response test?

In 2005 the W3C Working Group wrote a paper on the Inaccessibility of CAPTCHA and there were some interesting findings. Most importantly they discovered that many of the CAPTCHA systems can be defeated by computers with between 88% and 100% accuracy and that all CAPTCHA effectively does is give site owners a false sense of security.

So if you implement a CAPTCHA system and are only able to achieve at best a 12% success rate in avoiding abuse of your system, then surely it’s time to implement other human verification methods?

Today I stumbled across an amazing initiative called GivenGain which is run by a bunch of South Africans. Here’s a quick excerpt from their About page.

We call our service GivenGain because we believe that we are rich only through what we give, and poor only through what we refuse and keep.

GivenGain has an established reputation as a service provider to the non-profit sector. We provide a web-based platform to non-profit and support-based organizations with a complete electronic payment, donor management, online publishing, and communication solution.

We have offices in London (UK), Stellenbosch (South Africa), and further represented by partners across the world.

Why this site has interested me considerably is largely due to the fact that fund-raising online is a model that doesn’t really generate that much cash for the organisations in question. Well not in South Africa that is. Unlike other initiatives GivenGain is a model that appears to be working very successfully.

According to the site they’ve generated a total of $37,5 million donated by more than 32,000 individuals and this has directly benefited 1,626 projects. This is stagerring if you think about. It means that on average each individual donates $1,143 and each non-profit project receives $23,118. Granted this is an average and others have donated more/less while other projects have benefited more than others but it’s a massive average at that.

The team behind this initiative deserve to be commended. More often than not people in this industry only ever focus on the players who make the most noise but these giants in the online space are not only doing a whole lot more but making a success of it at the same time.

Because I only understood the theory of search engine technology it wasn’t as easy as I had thought to start my own and implementing the technology was an extremely complicated experience. My very first version was powered by Lucene but as it was powered by Java (and TomCat) I had great difficulty in getting it to work as expected.

I then ran a version of mnoGoSearch which was run as a Perl command line utility and while this one seemed to give me the best results I had resource issues which hampered my efforts. What I soon figured out was why Google has a few hundred thousand servers powering their search engine and after about a week of indexing South African websites I ran out of disk space. With about 8 million records indexed I had used up my 80GB hard drive.

So, in the end Grabble went PHP and while I retained some indexing capabilities from mnoGoSearch I also tapped into Yahoo to help out. At the time Yahoo didn’t have a search API so I had to do a lot of hacking to get results returned from Yahoo. In particular, Yahoo provided all the image, news, videos, blogs, sport and forum search results.

While being in awe of Google I also felt that total dominance of only a few players in the market wasn’t a good thing. I believed, esoterically at the time, that local search needed to be dominated by a local company. These beliefs I still hold true to heart and I feel that it’s critical that competitors exist. There is something very uncomfortable in knowing that one or two companies hold the majority of the world’s data and I was convinced that Grabble would be a winner.

Almost three years later and I’ve been debating what to do with Grabble. For the last two months the site hasn’t even been operational (well web search anyway) and while I didn’t want to close it down completely I also had to face the reality that Grabble was never going to dominate and I simply did not have the time to maintain it any longer.

Then along came 4hoursearch – a website powered by the Yahoo BOSS search API and running off Google AppEngine. I stumbled across this site by chance and realised that they had released their source code under GPL. Subsequent to this finding I have now moved Grabble onto this Python software and my final version of Grabble has now been hatched.

What this final version does is allow me to keep the site up for those who still want to use it and at the same time it gives me an opportunity to say goodbye. Running through the Yahoo BOSS API means that I don’t have to worry about indexes any longer and living on the Google AppEngine means technology is now taken care of.

I have learnt so much about search through my efforts with Grabble and I hold it very close to my heart. While it never took off it did give me an opportunity to expand my knowledge and experience in an area I felt passionate about and the learning curve I’ve gone through has certainly helped define where I am today.

One aspect of globalisation that tends to be most apparent in almost every facet of life is the emergence of technology – particularly the way in which technology is globally integrating people of the world. The advent of the Internet has over the past decade provided a common platform upon which countries from all corners of the Earth are able to communicate and share information.

Global Emergence of the Information Age

In the space of thirty years technology has caused widespread improvements in access to information and economic potential.

If you consider that just twenty five years ago the use of personal computers was still limited to a fairly small number of technologically advanced people while the majority of people produced documents with typewriters.

Twenty years ago, large and hefty mobile phones were carried only by a small number of users and some fifteen years ago only limited universities and scientists were using, or had even heard about, the Internet.

Today however computers, mobile technology and the Internet have transformed communication and commerce, creating entirely new ways for retailers and their customers to transact and for businesses to manage the flow of production and market their products.

Websites, chat rooms, instant messaging systems, email, forums and other Internet-based communication systems have made it much easier for people with common interests to find each other, exchange information, and collaborate which was almost unheard of until the Information Age.

Technology Transformation in South Africa

With over 30 million subscribers the mobile industry in South Africa is booming. While this industry is largely controlled by the major mobile phone operators, making entry into the market difficult, almost every South African has access to mobile technology.

Internet adoption in South Africa has been slow off the starting blocks. There are some 5 million people accessing the Internet everyday and currently we have more than 1 million broadband subscribers yet these figures represent only a small portion of the population.

One of the primary reasons for the poor rate of adoption of broadband and the Internet, in comparison to the mobile industry, is the high-costs associated with going online. Added to this, South Africa has not had the technology or infrastructure to facilitate fast adoption rates and the early adopters have had to uncover defects and fund development of the technology further.

Fortunately, over the last couple years, companies and local government have been investing heavily in Fibre optics and the infrastructure needed which will not only help drive costs down but also increase accessibility and adoption through the use of these improved technologies.

Leveraging Technology

Technology facilitates the expansion of products, ideas, and resources among countries as well as people regardless of geographic location. Technology can be leveraged to create efficient and effective channels to exchange information and can be the catalyst for global integration.

The single greatest benefit of technology is its ability to multiply effort. This multiplier of technology turns the effort of one person into many.

Any business can leverage technology to work:

• Faster
• Productively
• Predictably
• Safer
• Efficiently

With the advances in technology any business can now do more with less.

Challenges and Successes

As an emerging market South Africa has some fundamental issues affecting global emergence. Some of these include high-costs, low Internet penetration, unemployment and lack of education, yet despite this advances in technology are producing many positive changes in our society.

Technology innovations have created new jobs, promoted the growth of new markets, and increased international trade and investment but one of the biggest technology challenges we need to address, which makes us unique to first-world countries, is the major divide between mobile and Internet users.

What is evidenced today is that only a small minority access the Internet while the majority of the population use their mobile phones for various tasks yet there is little to bridge the two users together.

The greatest opportunity that exists in our global emergence is the ability to understand how to use all this technology to our advantage, bridge the gap between mobile and Internet users, and in turn solve the various communication and technology problems that we are faced with as a developing country.

This post is a chapter of the SA Blook: A Piece of Significance, an online book written by a diverse group of writers with strong views of our country and the reality we find ourselves living in. The other chapters in the Blook are here:

Introduction
1. The new South Africa – is it real?
2. Is SA rich or poor?
3. What the world thinks of South Africa and what our global opportunities are
4. The importance of each individual’s contribution collectively
5. SA Inc and the business of doing business in SA
6. The beauty and grandeur that surrounds us
7. The importance of technology in SA’s global emergence
8. Building brand South Africa
9. Making the most of SA’s creative talents and abilities
10. Innovate for a better South Africa
11. The role of the younger generation in SA, and what we need to do to support them
12. Connecting South Africa – Communities that transcend technology
13. We are African – the role of collaboration in South Africa’s growth

Copyright Justin Hartman 2008. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial No-derivatives 2.5 ZA license.

The good news however is that I managed to get a SIM from overseas that un-bricks my iPhone and now I have a fully functional iPhone working on the Vodacom network. (More details on this to follow)

And this is the result after hours of deliberation. Well worth the effort if you ask me!

On Wednesday I had a meeting with Rutger-Jan van Spaandonk who is the executive director and shareholder of the Core Group. In case you don’t know Core Group are the official distributors for Apple, Nintendo and Tom Tom in South Africa.

RJ is an interesting man and he gave us a full status quo of where his products are placed in the SA market which was fascinating. What was more interesting though was when he told Gregor, Carly and myself that Microsoft owns a small stake in Apple Inc.

The big Apple vs. Microsoft war seems rather pointless after news of this so I decided I wanted to quantify this statement with some facts.

Turns out that at the 1997 Macworld Expo, Steve Jobs announced that Apple would be entering into partnership with Microsoft. Included in this was a five-year commitment from Microsoft to release Microsoft Office for Macintosh as well as an investment of 150,000 shares of Apple Series A, nonvoting, convertible preferred stock worth $150 million.

Steve had this to say to the audience.

If we want to move forward and see Apple healthy and prospering again, we have to let go of a few things here. We have to let go of this notion that for Apple to win, Microsoft has to lose. We have to embrace a notion that for Apple to win, Apple has to do a really good job. And if others are going to help us that’s great, because we need all the help we can get, and if we screw up and we don’t do a good job, it’s not somebody else’s fault, it’s our fault. So I think that is a very important perspective. If we want Microsoft Office on the Mac, we better treat the company that puts it out with a little bit of gratitude; we like their software.

Microsoft found themselves in a monopolisation legal battle and Bill Gates recognised that if Apple failed Microsoft would have no case that there were other, alternative operating systems available to consumers. It was a win-win situation for both companies.

The 150,000 shares were convertible by Microsoft after August 5, 2000 into shares of the company’s common stock at a conversion price of $8.25 per share. During 2000, 74,250 shares of preferred stock were converted to 9 million shares and in 2001 the remaining 75,750 preferred shares were converted into 9.2 million of Apple’s common stock. All 18.2 million shares were sold by Microsoft in 2003.

Currently, Microsoft owns about 0.0046% of Apple through a Private Capital Management fund and Apple owns about 0.39% of itself the same way so whether Microsoft ever held any power in the company is questionable at best.

I was particularly excited about this workshop because I’ve had my fair share of legal complications over the last few years and I was keen to hear what the experts had to say.

Daniella went into great detail on how technology law implicates corporate business as well as SMEs and highlighted some important aspects in terms of company liability which I found particularly interesting. While I no longer own a business I can see the value of what Daniella was presenting in the workshop and this is a must for any Director or business owner.

Paul’s take on New Media law was fantastic and he really gave a great overview on various new media topics and provided some insight I’ve previously not given much thought to. Some of what was discussed has a serious implication for The Times so from this perspective alone I have to say the workshop was well worth it.

If you’re new to the game or just lack the legal understanding – which most of us do – then this is a workshop you simply can not miss out on. I know there is another one planned in the next couple months so make sure you follow the wiki for more info.

I only have two suggestions for both Paul and Daniella:

1. Limit questions to the end of each presentation. It was really nice to have interaction during the presentations however the net result was that Paul’s presentation was rushed. Leaving questions for last would provide more value at the end of the day.

2. While this workshop was a great introduction to technology and new media law I’d like to see a more in depth workshop on these topics. I’d really like a whole day event where we can really delve deeper into these issues because for the layman things aren’t 100% clear until you can really analyse things properly.

Joost can best be described as a blend of traditional and Internet TV in one user-friendly desktop application and as Joost’s website explains:

“It’s free TV, with the choice to watch alone or with friends. Joost is packed with internet tools such as instant messaging and channel chat, allowing people to really share the TV experience……. Joost isn’t just video on the internet – it’s the next generation of television for viewers, content owners and advertisers everywhere.”

The desktop application, available for PC or Mac, is really an experience to behold. It’s simple, easy to navigate and offers a huge set of features that really start to change your perception of what TV is meant to be.

Navigation happens via the half-circle buttons in the application and clicking on the Channel Catalogue to the left of the screen brings up a well formatted bouquet listing of available Channels and Genres. I counted more than 180 different channels to chose from and there seems to be a big focus on music channels in general.

Once you’ve found a channel you like, in my case the Sport Illustrated Swimsuit channel tickled my fancy, you simply click on it to get a full listing of available items to watch.

But the fun doesn’t end there. There are integrated Widgets built into Joost and clicking on the My Joost link brings up a list of available widgets that you can install to the application. This is where the interaction begins and widgets like video rating, Instant Messaging and blogging functionality are sure to be popular with the Geeks of tomorrow.

Ok, so Joost is cool but can the same model be applied in SA? Well the short answer is not until broadband becomes more of a reality in this country. We have this silly misconception that we have broadband in this country when in fact we have a narrowband infrastructure.

I’ve been testing Joost on a 1Mbps connection and I haven’t been able to watch one single clip, video or movie without it buffering. This as you can imagine makes TV viewing on the Internet impossible.

Having said that I do feel that if Telkom get their act together and Telkom Media start seriously contending with Multichoice we as consumers could be the big winners in the end. Telkom’s idea of broadband for the next couple months years is speeds of up to 16Mbps which will make products like Joost and IPTV in South Africa a more viable option.

And my advice to Telkom Media, e.Sat, On Digital Media, Walking on Water and MultiChoice – download your copy of Joost now and start modeling your IPTV offering off this.

Wikipedia’s edit history for the article “HIV/Aids in South Africa” shows repeated vandalism from IP address 164.151.130.36. This address resolves to a machine called mx1.statssa.gov.za, located just off the Ben Schoeman highway in Centurion, and is owned and operated by the South African government.

As if this isn’t bad enough I just finished reading an article on TechCrunch about the Australian Prime Minister’s Office having been caught editing Wikipedia as well. TechCrunch have reported that

Staff from the Office of Prime Minister and Cabinet (PMC) edited Wikipedia entries that were damaging to the Goverment, including pages covering the Children Overboard Affair and Mandatory Detention. Other edits included deleting the nickname of “Captain Smirk” from the Wikipedia biography of Australian Treasurer Peter Costello, and a range of bizarre edits, including the addition of the line “Poo bum dicky wee wee” to a Wikipedia article on Bubishi, a book related to Martial Arts.

These recent plots by Governments have been uncovered by the Wikiscanner which lists anonymous Wikipedia edits from large corporations. The question this raises (and has done so for some time in my mind) is just how reliable Wikipedia really is. I’ve always implored the effort of Wikipedia but as with anything opened to public consumption you leave yourself open to cheating and blatant propaganda that can’t really be combated.

I was trying to show my wife the NYT video review of the iPhone on Colin Daniels’ blog this morning only to find a big white block in place of the video player located on his page. I’ve watched this video there before so I figured there must be an issue with his blog.

I decided to find the original video on The Times’ Multimedia site only to discover that the video player on this site was too rendering in a huge white block.

So, at 8:30 this morning I phoned Colin up to tell him his video player was messed and he better sort it out. The panic in his voice was evident and I can only imagine what was going through his mind while he drove into the office!

Needless to say I received a call at about 9:00 to tell me that the video player was perfect on his side and while on the phone I clicked exactly what the root cause was.

In an effort to combat porn and adult sites from being viewed by my nearly 4 year old son Luke, I decided to activate the child protection settings on my Netgear router. Part of this process is to add keywords that you want to block and the word anal was one of them.

When I checked the log file of my router I realised that the Multimedia site for The Times contains google-analytics code on the site and hence the video was being blocked from my side.

Imagine my embarrassment when I had to call Colin and tell him I was a twit…

Facebook Apps however is changing the very focus of this simplicity and I’ve noticed a huge influx of requests for me to add various third-party applications to my profile. It is clear that Zuckerman and his company have probably more than doubled their market value by allowing companies to integrate with Facebook but I think from an end-user’s perspective it’s a bad move.

Since these horrible requests started streaming in (see pic) I’ve found myself using Facebook less and less and while I’m not a conventional user of Facebook I feel it’s lost its value for me.

I think that like Twitter, Facebook will become a thing of past for me.

At a whopping R6,300 I wonder how many people can afford to actually purchase this hunk of dead-weight? Ok, maybe I’m being too hard on the PS3 but as far as I can see it offers very little to command such a high purchase price.

According to Sony’s PlayStation website the PS3 comes with a 60GB hard drive, superior quality 7.1 digital sound, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, 4 x USB ports and integration with PSP. All sounds reasonable except you could purchase a PC with the same specs for about half the price and let’s face it even entry level PCs look slicker than the new PS3 design.

I’m also curious to know what games are going to cost? Historically games have been the most expensive commodity in owning a PlayStation and with their new Blu-ray Disc technology I guess it’s safe to assume that games will come in around the R1,000 mark!?

I have never owned an Xbox but it seems to me that Microsoft have catered for all income brackets in terms of the ability to buy a basic system for a few thousand Rand. Maybe Sony are doing the same but I see no reference to this anywhere and it looks like one size fits all apparently.

In my honest opinion gaming products should never surpass monthly car repayments and at this price herewith ends my long-standing relationship with Sony and dare I suggest a new one with Microsoft’s Xbox.

Grabble and others should be back online in the next couple hours/days…

Most will now know that I was employed by Ja! Productions at the beginning of February this year. What people may not know is that Ja! is the company behind Twac.co.za. I was hoping to hold off a little on blogging about Twac as we’re still working through a list of changes/bugs/feature requests but my article today on SA Rocks takes a high-level look at the new video sharing websites and Twac is now one of them.

So what is Twac? Well let me tell you what we’re not. We are not a YouTube and we have no intention of becoming or even trying to compete with the giant. All we are interested in is to be a hub for quality South African content with a really strong emphasis on user generated content within schools. While there is little UGC at the moment under the video section I am told that from next week you should start to see some of this UGC from the school kids directly.

On the converse we have Twac Couches. These couches are short 2-3 minute comedy clips produced by our team of award winning professionals. If you like a bit of sophisticated humour Twac Couches is for you.

There are still a lot of additional things to come and be fixed and because we only launched last Wednesday I’m going to ask if you just be patient while we get the site running at optimal performace. If you want to you could even give me some feedback – good or bad! In the meantime enjoy our Competition clip which is embedded in this post.

In the spirit of humanity I’ve decided to kick off the column with a focus on the ever-popular desktop operating system, Ubuntu in my Linux for human beings article.

In only two short years and millions of users worldwide Ubuntu is a major player in the Linux world and Canonical, the commercial sponsor of Ubuntu, has been named one of the ‘Top 20 Companies to Watch in 2007′ by Linux Magazine. It was selected as one of the companies best positioned in the coming year to spur Linux and Open Source adoption, while delivering on the immediate needs of the market.

Then interestingly enough tonight I got a request from her to join a group on Facebook which I diligently obliged to do but the really scary thing is about two hours later I got a friend request from Paul at Chilibean. After never using the system I suddenly get found by him and I had no choice but to mail him and ask how on earth he hooked up with me. Turns out it’s quite easy but a little freaky at that!

This has now in turn got me going and I’ve started to setup a small profile on Facebook. I’m even thinking about putting up some real pictures of me… but only time will tell. I’ve also been looking at Facebook in terms of its functionality and in principle it seems half decent.

The best thing I found is that you can setup an RSS feed from your site and it will publish your posts in Facebook which is super-cool!

In truth though I’ve really come to like MyBlogLog as a social networking tool but I can see for people who don’t have their own sites, such as my dear friend Lisa, Facebook is great to blog and keep in touch with the world.

On a side-note I managed to score a 1-year Pro subscription on MBL so I’m a really chuffed guy but unfortunately I can’t tell you how or why… sorry!

Anyway I digress – at some point though we have to draw the line with all these sites. When is enough actually enough? I barely have time to blog let alone keep up these social networks but maybe it’s a small price to pay for social fame. Thoughts anyone?

Basically, Jobs is calling for interoperability utopia. And, the only way to get there is to stop protecting the music.

Stop protecting music? Won’t that increase piracy? Well, actually not really. And, Jobs makes a great point.

First off, a lot of piracy happens when people take a CD and share that with 100 of their best friends, who in turn share that with their 100 best friends. I’ve heard enough teenagers talk about how they have a library of 15,000 songs, but only paid for 1 CD in their entire life.

Secondly, Jobs has a point. The reason for his challenge is because dropping DRM might accelerate the market for legal digital music sales. Just think about how prohibitive it is to use your gadgets or services because they don’t work with each other. If I could download my songs stored on iTunes onto a new Microsoft Zune or Sony player, or if I had a Napster account and I could download those songs onto my iPod — well, life might be easier.

Now, the record labels think that if the digital music market explodes, then the end of CD sales would be here sooner rather than later. Rich Greenfield of Pali Research puts it this way: “Dropping DRM would speed the digital adoption process but hasten the decline of CDs.. But the only chance of ending interoperability is to give up DRM.”

Obviously, Greenfield agrees with Jobs. But here’s another reason why Jobs has a point, which also goes back to my comment about piracy from that one CD. Greenfield says, “As long as you allow one copy that doesn’t have DRM – in any context — you won’t stop piracy.” True. So, what he’s saying is why save the CD business – even though it still account for 85% of the music industry – when the ultimate demise of it might actually help out in the long run.

Here’s what ace attorney Fred von Lohmann of Electronic Frontier Foundation had to say:
“It’s exactly as Jobs says — the major labels could solve all the interoperability headaches today by simply dropping their demand for DRM on music. It’s not as though the DRM is doing the major labels any good in a world where they continue to sell millions of unprotected CDs and iTunes permits fans to burn protected downloads onto unprotected CD-Rs.”

Original article here.