MLA 2008: What's Coming In Under My Door?

I just got back to my room after the MLA 2008 opening reception. The MLA tradition is that most people go to the reception early and then get together with friends for dinner.

Since the vendors don't put out their best free stuff at the reception, plus I am planning to do the 6:30 AM Sunday Majors walk (free breakfast and a t-shirt), I went to dinner with friends beforehand and didn't get to the reception until the last half hour.

After getting back to the room, dressing 'down', turning on the TV (Note to Hyatt: Why provide a 37" wide screen without offering HD?!) and booting up the Mac a bunch of stuff came flying under my door.

It isn't enough that we get vendor materials in the mail before the conference and in my conference pack, we also get it hand delivered to our rooms. I fully understand the role that vendors play in putting on a conference. Conferences are expensive. Vendor support is essential. In fact, a vendor is probably paying for my Internet access as an 'official conference blogger." Thank you, whomever you are.

In total, there were eight pieces of vendor literature delivered to my room, and no good free stuff. The problem I have with all this literature is that I will just throw it all away. In fact, I speculate that 80%+ of all the vendor materials printed and brought to the MLA conference gets thrown away at the conference site. The vendors will see that as a good thing since the 2o% percent retention may lead to few sales.

Even if I were a collection development librarian, I would probably still go to the vendor web site rather than take all their promotional literature. Good free stuff, that I'll take. (Anyone giving away USB drives?)

I just hope the Hyatt has an aggressive paper recycling program. Sphere: Related Content

CAPTCHA Captured?

If you ever purchased tickets online or even posted blog comments then odds are that you have used CAPTCHA (tm Carnegie Mellon University) but did not know that the technology had a name or that a large NSA funded project is behind it. CAPTCHA stands for "Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart" and is a challenge-response test used in computing to determine whether or not the user is human.

The most common type of CAPTCHA displays an image containing distorted letters of a word or some sequence of letters and numbers. The user then needs to type the letters of a distorted image.

An alleged Russian security researcher announced the other week that his team has developed a system that correctly identifies the images from Yahoo's CAPTCHA system 35% of the time. Yahoo apparently confirmed that this was the case:

" We are aware of attempts being made toward automated solutions for CAPTCHA images and continue to work on improvements as well as other defenses. " [InformationWeek]

It does raise the question if solutions that require human processing, such as 3D CAPTCHA, would be a better solution.

Lastly, some have wondered if 'researcher' could be is in violation of the DMCA because they are circumventing security. As long as they continue frame their discovery as 'research' they appear to be safe. The DMCA states:

"An exception for encryption research permits circumvention of access control measures, and the development of the technological means to do so, in order to identify flaws and vulnerabilities of encryption technologies."

Sphere: Related Content

On the Internet Everyone Knows You're a Dog

I have a confession to make. I have knowingly used 'misleading' information when prompted for personal details by web site registration systems. With this admission I am probably now on the watch list for many commercial Internet companies.

Well, the days of being able to use misleading information may be over. Soon, everyone will know if you're a dog or not.

On March 29th, 2007 Xerox submitted patent application 20070073681 entitled "User Profile Classification By Web Usage Analysis." The application covers a method that can either eliminate the need for web sites to request personal information or invalidate the information provided. The application itself is an algorithm communicated though 16 figures consisting of flow charts, vectors, and plots. The application's detailed description states:

"When accessing a set of web pages, Internet users that share a common profile attribute, such as a particular demographic characteristic, may choose to access similar or identical pages within the set. For example, some web pages may appeal to persons having a particular gender. However, a user having the particular gender will not necessarily access all web pages that are of interest to other users sharing the same gender. Thus, the fact that a user has accessed a particular web page can be informative, but the fact that the user has not accessed other web pages may not necessarily be as informative. In accordance with the present invention, the set of web pages accessed (or "visited") by a user comprise a web page access pattern which can be analyzed to predict profile attributes "

Essentially, what Xerox has come with a method to determine demographic information such as age, sex and maybe even your income anyway by analysing your web page usage pattern and comparing it to a database of usage patterns from other users with a known background. My take on the application is that it doesn't matter if you use misleading information or choose not to reveal who you are, they have come up with a way to find out something about you simply by your information seeking patterns.

The application does not address privacy concerns. Sphere: Related Content