By moving lips, eyelids, eyebrows, and other bodily joints, a robot named Kobian that was recently unveiled in Japan is able to express its emotions.

However, if you’ve ever read The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, you know about Marvin the paranoid android. Maybe there is a downside to emotional robots. After all, who wants to deal with a depressed robot?

Unfortunately, most of them are MP3s that were ripped at a low bitrate. Yes, the file size is much smaller than it would be if they were WAV files, but the quality suffers. If only there was an audio format that was similar in file size to an MP3 and similar in sound quality to a WAV. Enter Josh Coalson who is the primary author of the FLAC format. Thanks Josh! Lossless audio means that an audio file can be compressed but the original quality will be preserved. And if that’s not cool enough, its also open source, so look for this format to gain popularity. I think we should all support this format in any way we can. Now what to do with all these lo-fi MP3’s? They must be good for something, like old CDs can be used as coasters. Let me know if you have any suggestions.

http://www.flac.org

Text based CAPTCHAs are no longer able to fool the bots. How long will it be before they can handle image based CAPTCHA’s as well? And is reducing your spam worth alienating a percentage of your users? The harder it is for a computer to solve, the more inconvenient it becomes for legitimate users. This results in less users. Many have pointed out that using CAPTCHAs to stop spam bots is doomed to fail and that we should use a different approach. Simple questions are often used effectively. Perhaps flash or javascript can help. But are these really solutions or only temporary measures to prolong the inevitable?

It’s like an arms race between spammers and spam blockers. Spammers aren’t just using bots anymore either. The new trend is to buy or outsource a cheap labor force to break CAPTCHAs. These data workers often earn much more solving CAPTCHAs than doing legitimate work.

The future of this arms race between spammers and spam blockers looks bleak. However, some see a silver lining to the spam problem in that we can harness the spammers to solve important AI (Artificial Intelligence) problems by using specific types of CAPTCHAs. Some of these problems include OCR (Optical Character Regognition), Voice Recognition, etc.

That would be great for AI, but does that mean your inbox will never be free of Wholesale Watches, fake Bank Account updates, Discount Pharmacy, Multiple Orgasms, and Online Diplomas? I hope not.

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