It actually stands for Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart, and while they’re a pain in the arse they do serve a purpose – helping sites work out whether you’re a human or an unthinking robot. If you’re filling out a reCAPTCHA, in particular, console yourself that you’re also helping recognise words that have defeated the computers processing real book scans.

Wasted attention

However you feel about CAPTCHAs, I guarantee that you have never, ever, seen them as a wasted opportunity to be advertised at. Have you?

Well, all hail Solve Media’s TYPE-IN™, a proprietary branded CAPTCHA “which places relevant brand messages where users are already engaged”.

I encountered one of these for the first time this morning, and felt that being forced to sit through a short video advertisement before seeing a conventional CAPTCHA was offensive enough to merit swears. Isn’t the whole point of a CAPTCHA to stop automated spammy adverts spoiling a website for humans?

According to Solve Media, the ads offer “Guaranteed engagement for advertisers”, which is true in a sense because one particular format of TYPE-IN asks you to parrot back a “Brand Message” to prove that you’re a human.

That’s right; obediently mumbling back some advertiser’s unique selling proposition goes to show that you’re a human. Rather than, say, some kind of empty, unthinking machine.

1) Ran Kies (yuk), upgrade found

2) Gave the relevant permissions. No, Samsung, you can’t have my personal information

3) Prompted for backup. This took quite a while on my lowly netbook

4) Downloading the firmware. This was suspiciously quick

5) Epic Failure. After momentarily preparing the firmware update components, Kies reported that it couldn’t obtain permission from the phone administrator. Which will be because it didn’t ask

I tried again (skipping the backup this time) but it failed in the same place and the same way. Will report back after a reboot of phone and PC.

**UPDATE**

OK, so when Kies says ‘phone administrator’ it means ‘computer administrator’. To get past this particular roadblock, close Kies and run it again, but this time right-click it and select ‘Run as Administrator’. The upgrade should then complete successfully: Gingerbread, finally.

In response to a brief Twitter discussion today, here’s the gist of it.

The myth appears to stem from the misunderstanding of a 1996 paper by University of Auckland computer scientist Peter Gutmann, in which he examined the potential for data to be recovered from an overwritten drive with the use of a magnetic force microscope (MFM). While he did propose a 35-stage overwrite process (typically available as ‘Gutmann’ in overwriting utilities), he added that for disks of the time, “a good scrubbing with random data will do about as well as can be expected.”

Researching the feature I spoke to Dave Kleiman, a computer forensic examiner and co-author of ‘Overwriting Hard Drive Data: The Great Wiping Controversy‘. He underlined that today’s disks are very different from those that Gutmann studied, particularly in relation to data density, and stressed: “What we’re talking about is meaningful data.”

“Sure, it is possible to recover a bit or a byte here and there across the hard drive, where possibly the head was mis-aligned [during the overwrite]. But that’s useless in this day and age: what [file] do you even know that’s less than 10kB big?”

Kleiman also pointed out that Gutmann himself had later written: “With the ever-increasing data density on disk platters and a corresponding reduction in feature size and use of exotic techniques to record data on the medium, it’s unlikely that anything can be recovered from any recent drive”.

For Kleiman’s paper, he and his fellow researchers calculated that even where data had not actually been overwritten, the probability of using an MFM to recover even a single 8-letter word from a Word document was 0.0002%.

When we spoke, Kleiman – a state and federal witness in computer forensics – wasn’t aware of a single case where data had been successfully recovered from an overwritten hard disk and used in evidence.

I’ve never, for example, told Facebook where I live, although it obviously knew when I joined the city’s group. I left the group a while back, but I recently realised Facebook had taken it on itself to complete the relevant fields in my – previously blank – address.

But it’s Linked in that’s really freaking me out.

For various reasons my girfriend and I aren’t connected on any social sites. We come from different groups of friends and, to date, have none in common on any online services. To put it another way, there’s nothing obvious that could connect us from Linked in’s perspective: no mutual friends, no address information, no common employer. Nothing.

So why does Linked in keep telling me I may know her? It’s right, of course, but how the hell does it know?

I got in touch with them a while back to ask if they’d kept my login details for Hotmail after I let the site search my contacts. They said not, and I’m pretty sure I believe them: I’ve changed the password since then anyway. The only other possibilities I could think of are that one or both of us has searched for the other’s profile and it’s picked up on this, or that they’ve noticed that we both access the site from the same IP address.

Whatever it is, it keeps suggesting us to each other, and today it went one further and began recommending my friends to Elaine.

It started with my ex-girlfriend, which was nice.

You may not have noticed it; it’s normally only displayed momentarily on the status bar.

However, if you have a printer that’s slow to respond you’ll often have time to read it and reflect on its irony – hell, even make a cup of tea – while Word prepares not to intrude.

Doubtless the extra pixels will give their swingometer unrivalled accuracy, but it’s unlikely to do much elsewhere. Polling stations – invariably primary schools, Baptist churches and village halls – rarely prove cinematic in front of a hasty-put-together piece to camera, while vote-counting runs through dreary hours in a thousand strip-lit municipal centres. These places do not need HD.

Nor do our politicians, to whom it should be denied. We may suspect many of being self-interested, mildly corrupt, out of touch, high-handed, ignorant, duplicitous and even mendacious, but we know for a fact that there are no lookers among them.

I, for one, wouldn’t cyber-stalk the corridors of power.

As long as the meeting points between politicians and the public are run by PR people, we have a problem. Brown will likely lose – more because he can’t play the comfortable everyman than for anything else. Cameron talks a nice line in it, having apparently met everyone the other day. Clegg seemingly hopes that not being either of them will be enough.

And perhaps it will. “Vote for change” must have sounded like a great slogan a few months back, but I hope the Tories are regretting it come 7 May. We’re warned off a hung parliament, but what if it brings electoral reform – and with it an end to these meaningless politics of presentation, gesture and the party line?

So, no; we don’t need to see democracy in high definition. And in the days before we vote we don’t even need to see it.

We should just be listening, and thinking.

IMAGES by cole007, based on the transcript of the second leaders’ debate (on Sky).

Recently, as I’ve gradually found the options that make Word act like a grown-up word processor, this had started to get annoying again: if you’ve got a netbook or anything else with a smallish trackpad, it’s easy to place the cursor at the beginning of your selection before accidentally flicking it the wrong way – at which point Word will include the word before the one you wanted to start at and you’ll need to begin the selection again.

Narg.

Anyway, after some self-editing made more tedious by the problem I was inspired to look for an option. To be fair, it’s an easy one to find:

-Click Word’s nameless round button
-At the bottom of the menu that appears click Word Options
-Click Advanced in the left-hand pane
-Un-tick the second option: When selecting, automatically select entire word
-Click OK to save the change

You can do the same thing for Outlook 2007 by following the above instructions from an email you’re reading or composing, but choose ‘Editor Options’ rather than ‘Word Options’.

Selection shortcuts

The downside of making this change is that you have to be slightly more accurate when marking the start of your selection. The upside, however, is that the application won’t fuck it up for you when you do get it right.

No doubt many users prefer this to be the default behaviour, but there are other keyboard shortcuts for selections that are easier to use in practice, particularly where it’s hard to give accurate mouse inputs. Moreover, these should work in all Windows applications:

Shift and cursor keys – select text
Control, Shift and left/right cursor key – select text one word at a time
Shift and page up/down – select text in big fat lumps
Control and ‘a’ – select entire document/dialogue/element (depending where the cursor is)

Yes, it turns out that Word’s separation of words with seemingly random amounts of fresh air is all about readability. As assessed by the Andrex puppy, I can only assume.

If you’re in the unlikely position of, you know, having a professional interest in copy with the correct number of spaces, it turns out there is a way to fix it:

-Click Word’s nameless round button
-At the bottom of the menu that appears click Word Options
-Click Advanced in the left-hand pane
-Scroll down to the Display settings
-Tick Optimize character positioning for layout rather than readability
-Click OK to save the change

Incidentally, I discovered this when setting up a new netbook. With only 600 pixels of vertical resolution I was looking for ways to free up screen space, and particularly found myself wondering whether the huge Office Ribbon was strictly necessary.

If you’ve been using Office 2007 for a while, though, you probably know which of the ribbon views the various functions you use are on. Right-click the base of the ribbon, select Minimize the Ribbon, and revel in your liberated screen space.

I came to it late – about two weeks ago, truth be told. I’d been struggling with IE, and have never liked FireFox enough to settle on it, resulting in an unhappy, slow and memory-hungry mix of both, depending what I was doing.

The billionth intrusive, annoying and slow FireFox update made me give Chrome a proper look. Within a day it was the default on the three computers I regularly use, chiefly because it:

-doesn’t crash
-starts quickly
-opens new tabs quickly
-has tear off tabs
-actually fucking remembers passwords if you ask it to
-doesn’t have an intrusive update every time you open it

But even once you accept that it’s just going to work properly and be useful, the details keep giving:

-if a site isn’t in your favourites, the star icon on the favourites button is unfilled. If it already is, the star is full.
-Chrome remembers the last favourites folder you saved a site to (Internet Explorer 8; why did you make this such a monumental pain in the cock?)
-the status/preview bar at the base of the screen is only as big as it needs to be, and it only appears when it has anything to tell you. It’s repositioned to avoid your mouse cursor
-the default new tab screen (detail above) is actually useful; containing thumbnail views linking to your eight most visited sites
-whether you type an address or search in the address bar, the appropriate result appears straight away
-Chrome can sync your favourites between multiple computers

It’s ironic, really, that I’ve discovered how good Google’s browser is at a time when I’m increasingly disappointed with the quality of its search results, but there you go.