The World of Stuff .com

Exams, etc.

Mid-term exams were this week. I think I got an A on all of them except for Calculus. I’m not so sure about that one. The test was pretty hard, so a B sounds reasonable. That’s not so important, though. What’s more important is the grade for the quarter. I had had a B for most (if not all) of this quarter until this week, when a last-minute test and the grading of a huge assignment (which I did well on) caused my class grade to swell from an 86 to a 91. In a class where my grades often fluctuate (usually in a downward direction) by fractions of a percent, it was a surprising change. I ended up with an A after all.

Speaking of things that have to do with that, I got an e-mail from UF (the college I’m going to go to) about my application to their Honors Program. I had applied without really knowing what was involved, but I figured… well, I really don’t know what I was thinking. I was invited to apply because not everyone can apply. And yesterday I got an e-mail saying that I got in. Still, I want to know: What’s the catch? I know I’ll have to take at least one honors class per semester and maybe I can live in the honors dorm, but what’s the catch? I thought I heard that you have to do a research paper every month or something. Can anyone tell me the sucky things you have to do in the UF Honors Program, if there are any? Surely there must be some.

The non-lurkers of this blog might have already realized that the quesca (QUEstion Spam programs Can’t Answer) that has appeared in the comment form for over two years is now gone. That’s because I’ve found out about more ingenious solutions that don’t require people to consciously prove that they aren’t robots. The not-so-secret secret lies in the differences in which people and programs look at the comment form.

First of all, a program will look at a form and, if it has input fields with promising names, fill it out. A handy trick is to change at least one of the names and make sure that filling out that field is required. I changed name of the field “author” to “personWhosWritingThis” — it makes sense to a human but is probably meaningless to spambots who are looking for commonly used names like “author.” Having changed that field’s name, I created a new field called “author” which you won’t see (except in the unlikely case that your browser doesn’t recognize CSS). You won’t see it, but the robots will because it’s as clear as day in the code. So when the form is processed, it will check to see if the “author” field was filled out. If it was, the submission is blocked and no comment is posted.

Secondly, spambots tend to post comments more quickly than actual human beings, so if you set a speed limit for posting comments, you can catch submissions that are coming in at an inhuman rate. In the comment form, there is now a hidden field (not hidden with CSS like the previous example, but actually input type="hidden") that contains the Unix timestamp from the time the page loaded. When the form is submitted, the time is checked again. If the comment form submission comes only a few seconds after the page loaded, we can be fairly sure that it was a spambot at work. Again, the would-be commenter is greeted with an error message, and their comment is not processed. But just in case it was a real person, the error message tells non-robots to go back and submit the form again after a few moments.

Odds are, you won’t encounter either of these checks, and that’s just the idea. Together, they keep the spam at bay just as well as the quesca did, but with an added bonus of convenience for human readers. Having to prove that you’re human whenever you submit a form is a constant reminder that our future in the War on Spam is bleak. It will probably be a never-ending battle, but at least I have the upper hand this time. (And if you’re interested in learning how to do this for your own blog, this article has more detailed instructions. Or, if you want, I could show you my code.)

It seems that not many people understand DRM. Here’s How to Explain DRM to Your Dad.

On Google Video: Some guys from the British TV show Top Gear go to America and infuriate some rednecks.