To prevent spam bots from automatically creating accounts and posting content, people have come up with these distorted images of numbers and letters, which only a human can decipher and type into a text field. Since our corporate blog became the target of spammers recently, I read a bit about captcha images, and found out that spammers have devised a clever way to decode them. Optical character recognition would be too easy to block. What you need is a human to decode the image for you. So the spam bot takes the image from the site it wants to access, puts it onto the entry page of a free porn site run by the spammer, and waits for a human to decode it for him, without knowing that the captcha is recycled from somewhere else.

With the server move done, I had some to time to check out what could be the next big thing on the Web, or the Pointcast of 2005: Podcasting. The first thing I listened to was an interview with Adam Curry, a good introduction to podcasting itself and the rationale behind it. Not to mention Adam's stories about mtv.com and his former business partners, who either turned out to be on Scotland Yard's wanted list, or who ran off to Columbia.

Even more entertaining was Steve Wozniak's Gnomedex presentation, where he talks about his high school pranks, Captain Crunch and the founding of Apple.

Paul Graham's OSCON presentation was not much more than a reading of his (excellent) essays, but the interview is worth the download. One thing he says is that programming languages which people wrote to use themselves, like C, are superior to Frankenstein languages designed in a lab, like Java. I'm not sure if this is true for languages, but it certainly is for application frameworks. David Hansson mentions it in his two-hour video about Ruby on Rails, when he compares the current J2EE frameworks with Rails. And I learned it the hard way when we ported Siemens ShareNet to OpenACS in 2001. Since then, OpenACS has matured, but people still stick to four-year old lab-designed stuff which we gladly threw overboard while making ShareNet work.