Business Insider reports on a new video showing a robotic arm apparently defeating the “I am not a robot” captcha test. An anonymous reader quotes their report:

The Captcha the robot fools tracks the user’s mouse movements to make sure they’re a “real” human. So rather than trying to trick it with software — a tactic that can often be detected — it goes down the hardware route. Using a capacitive stylus, the robot physically moves the mouse on the trackpad, as if it were a real human wiggling their finger around. The computer doesn’t stand a chance.

So all you need is your own robotic arm — although even then, it’s apparently not that simple. The “I am not a robot” captcha grew out of Google’s attempts to fight click fraud, according to a 2014 article in Wired, but it does more than watch mouse movements. It also “examines cues every user unwittingly provides: IP addresses and cookies provide evidence that the user is the same friendly human Google remembers from elsewhere on the Web,” as well as some undisclosed variables, to create what Google describes as “a bag of cues.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – Can A Robot Fool ‘I Am Not A Robot’ Captchas?

Slashdot reader necro81 writes: A fantastic chameleon of the stage and screen has died. Sir John Hurt passed away at age 77. Slashdot readers should recognize him as the first person to have a xenomorph burst from his chest in the original Alien (a scene he later parodied in Spaceballs ). Others may recall he played the downtrodden protagonist Winston Smith in the film adaption of 1984 , then later played the tyrannical High Chancellor in V for Vendetta . Also: the titular character in The Elephant Man, Caligula in I, Claudius, Ollivander in the Harry Potter films and, more recently, Gilliam in Snowpiercer. But his career spanned decades and genres, and our world is a bit meeker and colorless without him.

Hurt also appeared as the War Doctor in five episodes of the new Doctor Who series, and provided the voice of Aragorn in Ralph Bakshi’s 1978 adaptation of The Lord of the Rings.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – Actor John Hurt Dies At Age 77

“Major internet providers are ending a four-year-old system in which consumers received ‘copyright alerts’ when they viewed peer-to-peer pirated content,” reports Variety.
An anonymous reader quotes Engadget’s update on the Copyright Alert System.

It was supposed to spook pirates by having their internet providers send violation notices, with the threat of penalties like throttling. However, it hasn’t exactly panned out. ISPs and media groups have dropped the alert system with an admission that it isn’t up to the job. While the program was supposedly successful in “educating” the public on legal music and video options, the MPAA states that it just couldn’t handle the “hard-core repeat infringer problem” — there wasn’t much to deter bootleggers. The organizations, which include the RIAA, haven’t devised an alternative.

“Surprise: it’s hard to stop copyright violators just by asking them,” reads their article’s tagline, which attributes the failure of the system to naive optimism. “It assumed that most pirates didn’t even realize they were violating copyright, and just needed to be shown the error of their ways.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – ISPs Finally Abandon The Copyright Alert System