wavelinks

Official Google Blog: Teaching computers to read: Google acquires reCAPTCHA

The image above is a CAPTCHA — you can read it, but computers have a harder time interpreting the letters. We tried to make it hard for computers to recognize because we wanted to give humans the scoop first, but we’re happy to announce to everybody now that Google has acquired reCAPTCHA, a company that provides CAPTCHAs to help protect more than 100,000 websites from spam and fraud.

Since computers have trouble reading squiggly words like these, CAPTCHAs are designed to allow humans in but prevent malicious programs from scalping tickets or obtain millions of email accounts for spamming. But there’s a twist — the words in many of the CAPTCHAs provided by reCAPTCHA come from scanned archival newspapers and old books. Computers find it hard to recognize these words because the ink and paper have degraded over time, but by typing them in as a CAPTCHA, crowds teach computers to read the scanned text.

via Official Google Blog: Teaching computers to read: Google acquires reCAPTCHA.

Tags: captcha, fraud, Google, OCR, recaptcha, spam

Apps.gov brings cloud computing to the Federal government | CTOvision.com

The Federal government embraced cloud computing today with the launch of the GSA operated Apps.gov which promises to bring efficient cloud computing services and infrastructure to the U.S. government agencies. As noted on the Apps.gov website:

“Cloud computing plays a key role in the President’s initiative to modernize Information Technology IT by identifying enterprise -wide common services and solutions and adopting a new cloud-computing business model. The Federal CIO Council under the guidance of the Office of Management and Budget OMB and the Federal Chief Information Officer CIO, Vivek Kundra, established the Cloud Computing Initiative to fulfill the President’s objectives for cloud computing.”

via Apps.gov brings cloud computing to the Federal government | CTOvision.com.

Tags: Apps.gov, Cloud Computing, CTOvision.com

Translation Technology Can Open Your Eyes to a Global Social Web – The Steve Rubel Lifestream

As more of us around the world join the web, a lot content is going to start to be produced in non-English languages. This hasn’t been a factor for a lot of us, but I suspect it will as we begin to discover content-rich resources and individuals we want to interact with.

Case in point. Recently I started reading a German blog that covers technology. It has a lot rich content, like for example the latest build of a portable version of Google Chrome – but it’s all in German.

via Translation Technology Can Open Your Eyes to a Global Social Web – The Steve Rubel Lifestream.

Tags: Google Reader, languages, Steve Rubel, translation

Google Public Policy Blog: Introducing DataLiberation.org: Liberate your data!

[well I have tried to get 7GB of  Gmail into a new 25GB pad up the road in Google Apps for Domains street and I had to leave 5GB behind so I read with interest]

Imagine you want to move out of your apartment. When you ask your landlord about the terms of your previous lease, he says that you are free to leave at any time; however, you cannot take all of your things with you – not your photos, your keepsakes, or your clothing. If you’re like most people, a restriction like this may cause you to rethink moving altogether. Not only is this a bad situation for you as the tenant, but it’s also detrimental to the housing industry as a whole, which no longer has incentive to build better apartments at all.

Although this may seem like a strange analogy, this pretty accurately describes the situation my team, Google’s Data Liberation Front, is working hard to combat from an engineering perspective. We’re a small team of Google Chicago engineers (named after a Monty Python skit about the Judean People’s Front) that aims to make it easy for our users to transfer their personal data in and out of Google’s services by building simple import and export functions. Our goal is to “liberate” data so that consumers and businesses using Google products always have a choice when it comes to the technology they use.

via Google Public Policy Blog: Introducing DataLiberation.org: Liberate your data!.

For every Judean People’s Front there is a People’s Front of Judea, Data, lig amach é!

Tags: data mobility

Google Fast Flip

[Honey I froze the web] Google Fast Flip is a web application that lets users discover and share news articles. It combines qualities of print and the Web, with the ability to “flip” through pages online as quickly as flipping through a magazine. It also enables users to follow friends and topics, discover new content and create their own custom magazines around searches.

via Features : Google Fast Flip – Google News Help.

Tags: fast flip, Google

RSSCloud Vs. PubSubHubbub: Why The Fat Pings Win – washingtonpost.com

[TechCrunch/Washington Post Reports] In the past few months, a lot of attention has been given to the rise of the real-time web. The problem is that the web wasn’t designed with real-time in mind. There is a huge need for the tech community to get behind new protocols that will power this fundamental shift in how web applications work. Today I want to take a look at two of the leading protocols that enable real-time notifications on the web. While there are older protocols that enable real-time notifications like XEP-0060, PubSubHubbub (PuSH) and rssCloud are two new protocols which show a lot of promise of gaining adoption.

Both PuSH and rssCloud address a fundamental flaw in the way web applications work today. Currently, getting updates on the web requires constant polling. Subscribers are forced to act like nagging children asking, “Are we there yet?” Subscribers must constantly ping the publisher to ask if there are new updates even if the answer is “no” 99% of the time. This is terribly inefficient, wastes resources, and makes it incredibly hard to find new content in as soon as it appears. Both protocols flip the current model on its head so that updates are event driven rather than request driven. By that I mean that both protocols eliminate the need for polling by essentially telling subscribers, “Don’t ask us if there’s anything new. We’ll tell you.”

via RSSCloud Vs. PubSubHubbub: Why The Fat Pings Win – washingtonpost.com.

Tags: atom, feed, Pubsubhubbub, PuSH, rss, rssCloud

World’s Largest Paid Blogging Platform Goes Real-Time – NYTimes.com

[the New York Times reports] Typepad, the SixApart-owned paid blogging service believed to be larger than any other online, announced this morning that every one of its blogs will now make updates available in real time. The service has implemented the Google-backed real-time protocol Pubsubhubbub, an Atom-centric alternative to the real-time protocol RSSCloud, which competitor WordPress turned on for millions of bloggers last week.

via World’s Largest Paid Blogging Platform Goes Real-Time – NYTimes.com.

What the Hell is Cloud Computing? | Strategies for Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), Governance Risk and Compliance (GRC), Open Source| PrudentCloud

I know every one and their grandfather has their own definition of Cloud Computing. As we go through the blogs, marketing paraphernalia we keep seeing the definition of cloud computing evolve or disintegrate. So I thought what would some of the top technology leaders feel and think of Cloud Computing. (No I did not pick the order based on their unbridled opinion rating).

I will start of with Larry Ellison, the oracle of software industry. Most opinionated and mostly correct, as history has proven, sometimes a few years later. Did I mention he is funny too?.

via What the Hell is Cloud Computing? | Strategies for Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), Governance Risk and Compliance (GRC), Open Source| PrudentCloud.

Tags: Cloud Computing, Eric Schmidt, Frank Gillett, Larry Ellison, Prudent Cloud, SaaS, Software as a Service, Steve Ballmer, technology leaders, video, Werner Vogels

McGarr Solicitors | Cloud Computing: European Data Protection Dangers

Cloud computing is rapidly becoming a buzzphrase in IT-reliant businesses. Its proponents include some of the largest technology companies in the world. But while enterprises may be able to save money by moving into the cloud it is difficult to see how they can do so with their customer’s personal information without breaching EU data protection law.

Household names like Google, Amazon and Microsoft are racing each other to create rival global platforms for the storage and manipulation of data. They have sent their marketers out amongst us to proclaim the Good News- Cloud Computing will reduce costs and improve service when compared to the traditional self-built and run server rooms most significant organisations are used to.

via McGarr Solicitors – Dublin Solicitors Ireland | Cloud Computing: European Data Protection Dangers.

Tags: Cloud Computing, Europe, European Data Protection, law, legal, McGarr Solicitors, privacy

How to Access Gmail When It’s Down – Gmail – Lifehacker

Last week’s Gmail outage is just the latest in a long series of outages in our favorite webmail application, but you don’t have to let that stop you from accessing your email and getting things done.

Access Gmail Through Alternate Modes

Just because the Gmail web interface went down doesn’t mean that Gmail is entirely down—often you can continue to access your account using one of the alternate web interfaces, which often are still accessible even when the regular web interface goes down.

via How to Access Gmail When It’s Down – Gmail – Lifehacker.

Tags: access, Gmail, Lifehacker