Tech Brief
On Tech Brief today: a new way to beat the bots, BlackBerry Torch bares all and the frustrations of wireless mice.
• Are you human? If you've ever struggled to read the sequence of letters and numbers in those messy boxes that often appear at the end of an online form, a computer may well have decided that you are not.
Now a company called NuCaptcha has come up with a more legible alternative in the form of video, writes Jolie O'Dell at Mashable .
"NuCaptcha's technology substitutes a brief video display of characters for the usual smash or squiggle of letters. It's definitely easier on the human eye, and its creators say it's also much more secure.
"Moreover, if humans find NuCaptcha as legible as machines find it illegible, it should help increase signups while decreasing spambots for web services and applications."
Captcha is a refreshingly simple acronym for Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart.
• Brands getting involved with social media are "asking for trouble" says expert Zaid Al-Zaidy at Marketing Week.
"We don't spend enough time imagining what might happen when we open our doors to real conversation with real people. Instead, in our little insular marketing twitter-sphere, for instance, we can read hundreds of micro blog statements such as 'can social media drive sales?', '5 ways to measure the effectiveness of social media'... etc."
Sounds like it might be time for a little less conversation.
• It didn't take long for newbie smartphone the BlackBerry Torch to get its kit off.
The Crackberry crew has posted a YouTube video of the device being dissected - and Engadget's Vlad Savov describes the results.
"[M]ost internals are either integrated or soldered down, but this undressing does afford us an opportunity to take a look at the biggest novelty in this new BlackBerry, namely its slider mechanism. It's impressively thin, rated for 150,000+ cycles..."
• Patrick Goss, a gamer at TechRadar, tried a wireless mouse out and he reckons they are simply not reliable enough.
"I have dabbled with wireless mice, but a series of horror stories involving death, destruction (only of my avatar fortunately) and severe gamer rage put pay to that brief foray. "
In other words, an average evening chez-Tech Brief.
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