There’s also one program at PARC called “CAPTCHA” which is designed to be a Turing test to tell computers and humans apart - the sort of shit thats implemented when you sign up for certain types of interenet services online, like email. Where it has a word that it wants you to type in, where its like all wavy or fucked up or something. The idea being that an automated sign-up program isn’t able to read these letters, and therefore is incapable of signing up for services:
- CAPTCHAs were named in honor of mathematician Alan Turing, who, in 1950, proposed using imitation tests as a means of distinguishing between human and artificial intelligence. In Turing’s time, people imagined future evil machines intelligent enough to dominate the human race. Today, what has come to pass is a more insidious invasion by machines. Mindless bots, driven not to dominate but to sell, sign up for thousands of free email accounts every minute, sending millions of spam messages from them. They grab tickets en masse for scalpers, lurk in chat rooms to hand out ads, skew recommendation systems, and scrape pricing data.
Bots! Of course! That’s awesome! If we can’t keep our personal information and lives secure from companies and govt prying into it, we can inundate them with a fucking tidal wave of data that they will have to sort through. I think we’re onto something here!
Think about it: if there are 10,000,000 different TimBoucherBots and viruses existing all over the world, which are constantly transmitting and distorting contradictory deluges of information over the internet, or other electronic systems, it will become extremely difficult for them to track what is my real activity and what is not. This deserves some more looking into.
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