Download - Future of the Internet – And how to stop it.

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Solutions
plore more efficient solutions. A spammer can write a program to fill in all the
information but the captcha, and when it gets to the captcha it places it in front
of a real person trying to get to a piece of information—say on a page a user
might get after clicking a link that says, “You’ve just won $1000! Click
here!” 35 —or perhaps a pornographic photo. 36 The captcha had been copied
that instant from a blog where a spammer’s robot was waiting to leave a comment,
and then pasted into the prompt for the human wanting to see the next
page. The human’s answer to the captcha was then instantly ported back over to
the blog site in order to solve the captcha and leave the spammed comment. 37
Predictably, companies have also sprung up to meet this demand, providing
custom software to thwart captchas on a contract basis of $100 to $5,000 per
project. 38 Generative indeed: the ability to remix different pieces of the Web,
and to deploy new code without gatekeepers, is crucial to the spammers’ work.
Other uses of captchas are more benign but equally subtle: a project called
reCAPTCHA provides an open API to substitute for regular captchas where a
Web site might want to test to see if it is a human visiting. 39 reCAPTCHA creates
an image that pairs a standard, automatically generated test word image
with an image of a word from an old book that a computer has been unable to
properly scan and translate. When the user solves the captcha by entering both
words, the first word is used to validate that the user is indeed human, and the
second is used to put the human’s computing power to work to identify one
more word of one more book that otherwise would be unscannable.
* * *
What do captchas have to do with privacy New generative uses of the Internet
have made the solutions proposed for Privacy 1.0 largely inapplicable. Fears
about “mass dataveillance” 40 are not misplaced, but they recognize only part of
the problem, and one that represents an increasingly smaller slice of the pie. Solutions
such as disclosure 41 or encryption 42 still work for Privacy 1.0, but new
approaches are needed to meet the challenge of Privacy 2.0, in which sensitive
data is collected and exchanged peer-to-peer in configurations as unusual as
that of the spammers’ system for bypassing captchas.
The power of centralized databases feared in 1973 is now being replicated
and amplified through generative uses of individual data and activity. For example,
cheap sensors have allowed various gunshot-detecting technologies to
operate through microphones in public spaces. 43 If a shot is fired, sensors associated
with the microphones triangulate the shot’s location and summon the
police. To avoid false alarms, the system can be augmented with help from the