My own personal keyboard twitch appears to be transposing the ‘o’ and ‘n’ in words ending ‘ion’. I have to watch for it when proofing myself, but it’s a typo that keeps on giving; always calling to mind a smaller, more Italian form of whatever I’m writing about: train statino, BIOS configuratino, administratino passwords.

A less frequent transpositino comes with words ending ‘ine’; most frequently when I substitute ‘machien’ for ‘machine’. On some days, using some computers, it’s more apt.

On the occasions when the story sounds interesting, you click the link and get asked to install a social reader, rather than just taken to the story. Install the reader and you become one of the people pumping out endless ‘X read Y’ updates to their friends’ timeline.

The problem is that you can’t turn it off, so imagine my joy this morning when I encountered this:

Yes please!

Imagine the crushing disappointment when I discover that, like marking the fucking things as spam, it doesn’t work.

Let’s face it, things have been a bit quiet on the blog. As such I’ve decided to start using it a bit more as a personal brain dump, probably – we’ll see if anyone objects.

That means it’s going to start wondering off-topic a bit. Hope that’s alright.

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.

It only took an hour or two to get unhacked, but we spent considerably longer puzzling over 4li’s manifesto: “If you hate Islam, We hate anyone who does not hate you!”

4li, we don’t hate anyone, except those two blokes in the BMW 1 series adverts. And hacking isn’t very nice.

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.

Possibly more.

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.

There seemed to be loads of #rednoseday about this year. Doubtless Twitter played a part in generating the impressive total, but one particular strand of giving seemed more self-serving than anything else: the odious “I’ll give £X for every RT/new follower” tweet.

Perhaps I’m a miserablist, but charity donations aren’t a way to buy attention. They’re a way to help the disadvantaged. If you give a shit, and it’s your money already, just donate it and shut the fuck up.

Not sure if it’s a permanent change or they’re just experimenting. I’m yet to see ‘Ouf of Africa’, but the Editors’ Picks should make it a little less spEak You’re bRanes, at least.