Some of the arguments for eating food from the plant sources are categorized here.

Environmental issues

•    Vegetarianism helps conserve fossil fuel in a major way. Studies have shown that it takes 35 calories of fossil fuel to produce 1 calorie of mutton; 22 calories of fossil fuel for 1 calorie of poultry; but just 1 calorie of fossil fuel for 1 calorie of vegetables. By eating plant food we can help conserve our non-renewable sources of energy.
•    It has been observed that it takes about 3 to 15 times as much water to produce animal food, as it does to produce plant food. Thus by becoming vegetarian we can conserve our water resources.
•    It is seen that it takes about 5-10 kilogram of plant matter and grains to produce one kilogram of animal protein. By eating this vegetarian food directly (and not through the animals) we can save a lot of this food material to feed all the hungry people in this world.
•    Plant foods have a longer shelf life than animal foods. One needs to spend more energy in preserving animal food products, thus exacerbating the energy crisis.

Health issues

•    The plant food takes care of all the nutrient needs. If we eat enough fruits and vegetables we will not suffer from any nutrient deficiency. On the other hand animal foods are largely deficient in vitamins, except for vitamin B complex.
•    Everyone knows that the animal foods are higher in fat and cholesterol than the plant foods. Animal foods are also high in protein content. This causes excess nitrogen in the blood; leading to many health problems. By eating vegetarian food, we can say goodbye to many bothersome diseases, such as heart diseases, osteoporosis, kidney stones, gall stones, diabetes, multiple sclerosis, arthritis, gum disease, obesity and acne.
•    Animal food is totally deficient in carbohydrates, which are essential for good health.
•    Animal foods contain far higher concentrations of agricultural chemicals than plant foods.
•    Most of the animals are given drugs such as steroids, antibiotics, and growth hormones. These drugs are consumed by us humans when we consume meat.
•    There are many bacteria and viruses that thrive on animal foods, when we eat these foods we end up eating these organisms as well. It is not as if the plant foods do not have any micro-organisms, but their number is nowhere near as much as in meat products.
•    Animal products take rather long to digest. They keep putrefying in the colon, creating intestinal toxemia. It is a well known fact that the condition of the intestinal flora is critical to overall health of the body. Vegetarian food travels quickly through the gastro-intestinal tract.
•    Plant foods are high in fibre content. Fibre absorbs unwanted, excess fats; cleans the intestines; provides bulk and helps in peristaltic movement; ensuring regular bowel movements. Meat, poultry, and dairy products are deficient in fibre content.
•    Animal foods contain the body wastes of the animals such as adrenaline, uric acid, and lactic acid.
•    When we consume plant foods we consume a chlorophyll module which is very similar to our hemoglobin.
•    Plant foods contain trace elements that not only nurture our cells, but are precursors of all our genetic material.
•    Animal food is primarily acidic in nature. It leaves behind an acidic residue after digestion. This acid upsets the delicate pH balance of our body. A chronically over-acidic pH ratio begins to corrode body tissues, produces neuro-toxins, interrupts all cellular functions and generally creates havoc with our health. However, some of the plant foods are also acidic in nature, and should be avoided e.g. alcohol, coffee, white bread, oatmeal, sugar, tobacco, chillies, and all packaged and processed foods.
•    Raw plant foods such as fruits detoxify our bodies, increase immunity, and improve our skin and hair.

Economic issues

•    Vegetarian foods cost much less than non-vegetarian foods. So being vegetarian makes a lot of economic sense.
•    When we eat vegetarian foods, we stay healthier; thus saving on health care expenses.

Ethical issues

•    If we love animals, we have no desire to kill them for food.
•    Our body has been designed in a way to make us natural herbivores. Our hands, teeth, feet, intestinal tract…all are different from those of carnivorous species.
•    Mahatma Gandhi promoted the spirit of non-violence, but this spirit can’t be fostered if we indulge in killing animals.
•    There can be no peace in the world, if we declare war on other species for food.
•    There are many substitutes available in the vegetable kingdom to satisfy all taste buds.

Spiritual issues

•    Plant foods carry an inner light; both philosophically and biologically, as natural sunlight is a vital ingredient of plant foods. This light nourishes our physical body, mind, and spirit.
•    Plant foods keep us healthy. These healthy cells have a harmonic frequency that raises our overall energy vibration.
•    Plant food is rich in natural energy, vital for self-transformation.
•    Ellen G. White the famous writer of early twentieth century said, “Whatever affects the body has a corresponding effect on the mind and soul.” In other words, what we eat affects our consciousness.

These are some of the factors that are making vegetarianism a fashion and health statement. I do not expect you to change your food habits based on what I have enumerated. However, if you keep an open mind and verify these truths in your own life, I am certain that you will feel inclined to turn vegetarian! Three cheers to that!!!

http://tickledbylife.com/index.php/why-is-it-good-for-you-to-be-a-vegetarian/

Ed Chi, a senior research scientist for augmented social cognition at the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), and his colleagues have now created a tool, called WikiDashboard, that aims to reveal much of the normally hidden back-and-forth behind Wikipedia’s most controversial pages in order to help readers judge for themselves how suspect its contents might be.

Wikipedia already has procedures in place designed to alert readers to potential problems with an entry. For example, one of Wikipedia’s volunteer editors can review an article and tag it as “controversial” or warn that it “needs sources.” But in practice, Chi says, relatively few articles actually receive these tags. WikiDashboard instead offers a snapshot of the edits and re-edits, as well as the arguments and counterarguments that went into building each of Wikipedia’s many million pages.

The researchers began by investigating pages already tagged as “controversial” on Wikipedia: they found that these pages were far more likely to have been edited and re-edited repeatedly. Based on this observation, they developed WikiDashboard, a website that serves up Wikipedia entries but adds a chart to the top of each page revealing its recent edit history.

WikiDashboard shows which users have contributed most edits to a page, what percentage of the edits each person is responsible for, and when editors have been most active. A WikiDashboard user can explore further by clicking on a particular editor’s name to see, for example, how involved he or she has been with other articles. Chi says that the goal is to show the social interaction going on around the entry. For instance, the chart should make it clear when a single user has been dominating a page, or when a flurry of activity has exploded around a particularly contentious article. The timeline on the chart can also show how long a page has been neglected.

Courting controversy: WikiDashboard gathers information about the social interactions underlying Wikipedia entries and displays it to a user. The entry for former U.S. president George W. Bush, shown above, stood out as the most controversial. The researchers discovered that certain statistics, such as the number of total revisions made to an article, could accurately predict controversy. Credit: WikiDashboard/PARC

The page on Hillary Clinton, for example, shows that the main contributor has put in about 20 percent of the edits. Chi says this suggests that this individual has guided a lot of the article’s direction. In contrast, an entry on windburn shows a much less heated scene: more even collaboration among the contributors.

The researchers released an early version of the tool in 2007 using data released a few times a year by Wikipedia. But Chi says that this version of WikiDashboard was limited, since it didn’t show the speed of change online. His team spent much of 2008 getting access to live data, which Chi says was difficult because of Wikipedia’s limited resources.

Daniel Tunkelang, chief scientist at Endeca, an information analysis firm based in Cambridge, MA, says that the tool is a step toward exploring the social context of Wikipedia entries, but he adds, “There’s some room for compressing this into something more consumable.” By this, Tunkelang means that the software could be more useful to the casual user if it summarized data more effectively. For example, he says that the list of articles that each editor has worked on could be shown as just a handful of easy-to-read tags.

At a talk given by Chi this week, Rob Miller, an associate professor at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab, noted that some Wikipedia editors try to rank up a high number of edits just to gain more kudos. He wondered how that tendency might affect WikiDashboard’s measurements should the tool catch on.

Chi’s group is still working on the WikiDashboard, and on Wikipedia data more generally. He says that he’d like to see a system that measures not just simple statistics such as the number of edits made, but also the quality of those contributions.

http://www.technologyreview.com/web/22076/page2/

When little known start-up Complete Genomics announced last fall that it planned to offer a human genome sequencing service for $5000 a pop, the sequencing community responded with a mixture of excitement and skepticism. Everyone wanted to get their hands on that kind of sequencing capacity, but in a field littered with grand claims, no one was holding their breath. Now the company, based in Mountain View, CA, has released data on its first human genome assembly.

Researchers generated about 630 gigabytes of raw genome data, approximately 40 percent of which mapped to existing human genome sequence. Like other new sequencing technologies, Complete Genomics’ process reads the sequence of very short pieces of DNA, which then must be computationally synthesized to create a whole genome. That data covered about 92 percent of the human genome–the remaining eight percent is likely made up of repetitive sequences of DNA, which have been notoriously difficult to sequence with newer technologies.

The company has already sent the raw data to the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI), which runs a publicly accessible database. Complete Genomics’ CEO Cliff Reid presented the research at a conference in Florida last night.

Complete Genomics’ technology is centered on two innovations: a way to densely pack DNA, developed by Rade Drmanac, the company’s chief scientific officer, and a method to randomly read DNA letters, based on sequencing technology developed at George Church’s lab at Harvard. (For more on the technology, see “Five Thousand Bucks for Your Genome“.)

The company has chosen an unusual business model: rather than selling instruments, as most sequencing companies have done, it plans to offer sequencing services through a commercial-scale genome center. At the conference, Reid emphasized the company’s plans to focus solely on human genomes. According to an article from Bio-IT :

“We’re a wholesaler of complete human genomes to the scientific community. We have no intention of writing NIH grants,” said Reid, adding he planned to partner with genome centers such as the Broad, research centers such as the Institute for Systems Biology, and the direct-to-consumer companies. The five-year mission was to build ten genome centers around the world that would sequence 1 million genomes in that period. “We’re trying to make sequencing completely ubiquitous.”

So how much did this genome actually cost? “We’re not giving out costs on all the gory details,” Reid told Technology Review. “The first sequence we did cost about $4000 in materials, and we are on track to getting materials costs down to $1000 by the time we start service in June.” That’s the target materials cost to enable a $5000 commercial service.

A statement from the company reveals its big goals for the next few years:

In preparation for its service launch, Complete Genomics is rapidly scaling up its commercial genome center. It plans to sequence 1,000 genomes in the second half of 2009 and 20,000 genomes in 2010. To analyze the enormous amounts of data that will be created, it is also expanding its data center, which will house 5,000 processors and provide five petabytes (five million gigabytes) of disk storage by the end of 2009, and 60,000 processors and 30 petabytes of disk storage in 2010.

Source:http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/editors/22618/

As you can see there are plenty of reasons to always keep an eye on how SEO friendly your pages are but I will try to offer more in depth explanations in what follows. All the factors that determine out rankings in search engines need to be carefully balanced because in the end Google will rank you but the humans are your real customers.

Constant optimization of your existing pages

Now you are probably wondering : if I do my homeworks and create SEO friendly content each time why do I need to rethink it ? The most direct answer is because of your bounce rate or simply because of the evolution of your website’s content.

Lets look at the first factor : the bounce rate. I’ve noticed on one of my websites that I was receiving high amounts of traffic from some keywords and it all went to an article. When I saw this I have to admit I was very happy but then I saw the bounce rate for those keywords : over 70% . If you don’t know, this bounce rate is huge. This basically meant that those who founded my article didn’t though it contain interesting information or information they would need – so they were bouncing quickly. I’ve remade the article including additional informations(more actual informations) and few links to other related articles and the bounce rate improved. When I made the modifications I wasn’t thinking on how to use keywords(the article was already receiving traffic) : I was interested only in the human factor – the one that decides the bounce rate.

The evolution of your website content can also determine the review of some articles. Lets say you created an article that was talking about a solution to a problem but was presenting the solution only from a point of view because at that time you were only concentrating on a specific subject. Now, you’re content has evolved and it covers a much more wide area : you’ll need to review some of your articles and add the additional information. Why ? If I rank well for that article, why ? Because if you rank well and humans think the information is incomplete then you achieved nothing.

New content requires attention

This is a self explanatory statement. Of course that you need to apply all the SEO techniques when creating new content. And giving the fact that you will always create new content then you’ll always have to think of SEO. Remember that SEO is used to improve the ranking of your pages on search engines. It doesn’t get you clients or clicks. That is why keep a good balance between your SEO and creating content for humans. The SEO techniques can lead you to some really bad content that humans will not dig – so remember that you have to create new content that is ranking well and is appealing to humans.

Does it matter if Google changes the rules ?

If Google changes the algorithm it’s doing this to help all of us that are searching the Internet to obtain better results. This means that Google is constantly trying to show you the content that has the biggest relevance on your search terms. If you’ve created content based on the rule that I’ve stated above then you’ll be alright. This is what Google wants : for you to create content for the people. The only problem is that the human brain is much more advanced then the Google robot so it can make connections that a piece of software would not even try to realize. And this is where SEO comes in handy : you use some rules to help the Google robot to understand what are you talking about.

Changes in the way Google ranks the pages should be a big concern to all those that are using all sorts of black hat SEO techniques to improve their rankings. I will not state here what those techniques are but basically if you are visiting a web page and the content of that page doesn’t sound right and every 5 words you encounter the same word and at the bottom of the page you see like 100 links with the same words in it then something is wrong.

The domain factor OR When SEO plays a small role

This is something that I know from my own experience. The domain of my blog is .ro and it’s hosted in Romania. If I do a search for “basic SEO analysis” I’m number one here but if you’ll do it in US then probably my post will not even show up. So writing an English blog in Romania for the people that are outside the country and expecting traffic is not an easy task.

Always be conscious about your SEO state and what are the things that really matter. For example in my case you’ll probably wonder how do I get traffic if there is a strong chance I won’t appear in searches made from US for example. I’m using what I know about SEO on all the social networks that I have accounts on and in the end that will drive traffic to my blog. Remember that being preoccupied about SEO all the time doesn’t necessary means you should concentrate only on your website or blog. Use what you know about SEO on all you do on the web and on the social networks but always remember the humans.

The human factor – the one that doesn’t care about SEO

In the end of this article I would like to reinforce the big thing. Use SEO to improve rankings on search engines but use it wisely. Google will only rank you : it will not get you money or new clients. Writing content that is fun to read or that offers an original point of view or that provides valuable information – that is what will make people click on your links and read your content and buy your services or your products.

If you like this article tell me what you think in comments bellow ? If you dislike it comment and tell me why ? If you disagree I would like to know your opinion. Share your ideas or experiences.

Source: http://blog.tomabonciu.ro/why-seo-is-a-247-job-facts-problems-situations/

5 DO’s on Social Media

1. Be Human : I wrote an article on Social Media Success Depends on How Human You Are and the main idea is to look at your social media activity from a human stand of point. You have to realize that your friends or followers on these social websites are REAL Humans and you have to treat them just like you’d do in real life.
2. Add something to the community : This is something you should do most of your time on social websites. Adding value and posting useful links or just comments that offer some information will help establish yourself as someone who knows things about your niche and who is constantly searching for new ones.
3. Offer your help for free : Here is a simple concept that works on social media : the more you offer for free the more you’ll receive back. Offering free information will increase your reputation and people will start to trust you. Free means no money but if your help requires a little bit of work from you at that point you can ask for a testimonial and sometimes a simple client review could help you get more clients.
4. Post at least 3 times per week on your blog : This is essential. At the beginning this is enough to start building a community but as time goes by and your traffic increases and so do comments you’ll have to post daily. There are bloggers that have lots of traffic and post whenever they feel like but not all of us are that fortunate. In the end it’s up to you to realize what works best for your niche but consider a minimum of 3 times per week.
5. Always expand your social network : Your friends or your followers represent your power, your influence. But don’t think it’s enough to be friends : you need to interact as often as you can with as many as you can. Keeping your follower active can get you great benefits.

5 DON’Ts on Social Media

1. Don’t Spam : For example if you are on Twitter don’t post something like “thanks for the follow to @…. and @… …” every 5 minutes. Use direct message for that. Don’t start following thousands of people just to send them a message with your website. It will not get you any benefits and soon you’ll be out of the game.
2. Don’t pitch people : Understand that social media is like hanging after hours with your friends. If one of them decides to contact you for your services it’s fine but not the other way around. For example if you and 5 of your friends are drinking beer would you say something like this to them(at some point) : “I’m offering SEO services at affordable prices” ? No. Because it will sound stupid and inappropriate. But if you talk about it in a natural way and not trying to manipulate the discussion to that direction then all your friends will know what you do and if they need your services and trust you they’ll contact you for sure.
3. Don’t rush into social media : this is a recent article I wrote and the basic idea is to try and take things one at a time. The reason is because sometimes it can be overwhelming to blog every 2 days and comment on 30 blogs daily and interact with your social friends every day. It takes time to get used to this. You can check the article and also view the video version of it : Don’t rush head first into social media.
4. Don’t broadcast : This refers to someone that seems to not pay attention to what is happening around him. Usually he keeps posting his links and he’s not interacting with the community. Imagine that in a bar there is someone in a corner that is speaking alone. He doesn’t care what the others have to say – he just has some things to say and after that he gets up and leaves. I don’t have to tell you how that person would be seen as.
5. Don’t use automated messages or auto follow or accept everyones invitation : This kind of thing is usually used by spamers or broadcasters or pitchers. They are the ones that auto follow everybody and send automated questions or requests to visit their site. Don’t do that. Remember the human factor and answer carefully to each of your new followers or friends. Personalize the message by using their name or a remark to their blog or website and you’ll get much more benefits.

What can you add to this

I know that these are not the only things you should or shouldn’t do on social media in order to be successful so I’m inviting you to post your advices or suggestions in comments bellow. I would love to hear from you and see what you think.

Source: http://blog.tomabonciu.ro/5-dos-and-5-donts-on-social-media-with-explanations/

Would-be victims are growing familiar with this basic phishing attack, however, and many e-mail and browser vendors have introduced countermeasures to protect them. So phishers are searching for new ways to sting the unwary, says Amit Klein, CTO of Trusteer, based in Tel Aviv, Israel. For example, the microblogging site Twitter is increasingly being used to distribute phishing links.

Nonetheless, Klein says that “the [basic] attack will not be as successful in the future as it has been up until now,” and in an effort to prevent future phishing attacks, his company is looking for better ways to con people out of cash before the bad guys can. A worrying new tactic being explored by some phishers, says Klein, involves hacking into a legitimate website in order to inject malicious code that throws up a pop-up window requesting individuals’ usernames and passwords for a banking site. This approach is of limited value, however, since most users will be suspicious of the sudden request.

A vulnerability in major browsers recently discovered by Trusteer could make this trick much more dangerous, by allowing for “in-session phishing” and a more tailored attack. Using this new vulnerability, a phisher could detect, via the hacked site, when a user was already logged in to a banking website. The hacked site could then launch a pop-up warning the user that her session has timed out and asking her to reenter her login details. This approach would be less likely to raise a red flag, says Klein, since the pop-up does not appear completely out of the blue.

The core vulnerability discovered by the Israeli researchers is a Web browser flaw that lets the phisher see what other websites a person is visiting. Klein explains that a certain JavaScript function, commonly used by online retailers, financial institutions, and other sites, leaves a footprint revealing that the user is logged in to that site. Klein says that protections such as pop-up blockers wouldn’t necessarily derail the attack because the hacked site could itself be altered to seem like a request to log in again.

“I think it is great that we are trying to identify additional venues of phishing attacks such as this,” says Nitesh Dhanjani, an independent security researcher who studies phishing methods and trends. For the time being, Dhanjani says, this kind of attack is beyond the technical abilities of the average phisher. “The bar is far too low to enter the phishing game, so the phishers have no reason to evolve into a sophisticated community,” he says. However, as users are better protected against the most basic types of attack, he says, the technical bar for phishers could start to rise: “Perhaps this is when we will see slightly more advanced techniques incorporated into phishing kits.”

Klein says that Microsoft, Apple, and Mozilla have told him that they plan to issue fixes for the browser vulnerability discovered by Trusteer. He adds that users can protect themselves by being careful to log out of banking and e-commerce sites before visiting other websites.

http://www.technologyreview.com/web/21975/page2/

“Our review found too little evidence that any given technology or set of technologies, on their own, will improve safety for minors online to any significant degree,” says the report, written by the Internet Safety Technical Task Force, a group of 29 businesses, nonprofit organizations, academic groups, and technology companies that conducted the investigation with the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University, at the request of 49 state attorneys general. “Moreover, the Internet itself, the ways in which minors use it, and the communities in which they participate, all change constantly, and the available technologies are quickly evolving.”

While no single age-verification solution can solve the Internet’s problems, tools are available to those who choose to use them, and social-networking sites cooperate with law enforcement and actively root out reported problems, says John Palfrey, a Harvard law professor who led the effort. Some 40 technologies are already on the market, including age-verification products and Web filtering and blocking programs.

The Achilles’ heel of age-verification technologies is, of course, that they only work if people use them. A parent can enroll his child with services such as CheckMyAge.com, which creates an online age-verification credential. But for the service to be effective, the child must always use it and require that others he encounters online also possess such a credential.

The task force did not dismiss the risk posed by adult predators, but it says that bullying by peers is a bigger issue that requires responses from parents and schools as well as continued law-enforcement attention. Online risks to youth “are not radically different in nature or scope than the risks minors have long faced offline, and minors who are most at risk in the offline world continue to be most at risk online,” the report says. “Bullying and harassment, most often by peers, are the most salient threats that minors face, both online and offline.”

Connecticut attorney general Richard Blumenthal, one of the prosecutors who had pushed for the study, gave it mixed reviews. “This report is a step forward in the fight to better protect children from predators and inappropriate content on social networking sites,” he said in a statement, but he added that “the report unfortunately downplays the threat of predators–in relying on research that is outdated or inadequate–and it fails to provide specific plans to implement technology in improving social networking safety.”

The padlock is part of the key online security protocol called SSL (Secure Socket Layer), and it appears as an assurance that a transaction is safe from eavesdropping, tampering, or forgery. A hacker can easily create a banking website that looks like the real thing, but it’s much harder to forge the digital certificate that accompanies the site. This is because SSL uses a clever trick to create each certificate: two mathematically linked keys, one of which is kept secret while the other is published openly on the Internet.

A select group of trusted higher powers–known as certificate authorities–can verify the identity of a website. An authority does this by checking that the site is genuine before combining its private key with the website’s public key to create the certificate. A main part of the procedure also involves applying what’s known as a hash function to generate a unique signature for the certificate. Anyone who visits that site can verify that this certificate is genuine by checking the signature and referring back to the certificate authority’s public key.

All this happens behind the scenes, and popular browsers such as Internet Explorer and Firefox have built-in trust for certain certificate authorities, explains Paul Kocher, president and chief scientist of the security company Cryptography Research, who was involved in creating the latest version of SSL. Any certificate that can be traced back to one of those authorities is automatically trusted by the browser. “The entire browser trust model relies on all of the certificate authorities acting well,” Kocher notes.

However, some certificate authorities still use a hash function called MD5 to produce certificate signatures. Most authorities have abandoned MD5 because researchers have shown it to be vulnerable to what is called a collision: under certain circumstances, it’s possible to produce two certificates that will generate exactly the same digital signature.

A hash function’s value disappears if it’s easy to produce two certificates with exactly the same fingerprint, explains Marc Stevens, a PhD student in the cryptology and information security group at the Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica, in the Netherlands, whose work on MD5 was crucial to the research. Stevens has been producing collisions using MD5 for several years, enlisting the computing power of 200 PlayStation 3 consoles. The architecture of these machines’ microprocessors is well-suited to the kinds of calculations needed for his work. Stevens says that it would take about 8,000 PCs to equal the power that the PlayStations provide. Using the hardware, the team was able to perform the calculations needed for the attack in the space of a weekend.

Handcrafted: Researchers at the State University of New York (SUNY), in Buffalo, have developed a CAPTCHA that mimics human handwriting and is distorted in one of several ways, in order to foil spambots. Credit: Achint Oommen Thomas

In the battle to beat the spambots, a new weapon has been developed that exploits the difficulty that computers have with recognizing joined-up handwriting. The hope is that switching from text-based verification systems to systems that use computer-generated handwriting will make many Web services more secure.

Developed by researchers at the State University of New York (SUNY), in Buffalo, the system is a variant of a commonly used challenge-response technique called a CAPTCHA (completely automated public Turing test to tell computers and humans apart). This kind of test is designed to be easy for humans but nearly impossible for machines to pass, to prevent automated programs from automatically generating new accounts for nefarious purposes like sending out spam.

Most CAPTCHAs work by displaying images of randomly generated text that has been distorted to make it difficult for optical character recognition (OCR) programs to read, without making it illegible to humans. To pass the test and gain access, users simply reenter the text that they have read.

The trouble is that OCR software is improving steadily, making it possible for spambots to sometimes pass these tests. “It’s an arms race,” says Achint Oommen Thomas, one of the computer scientists who developed the new system. “Every CAPTCHA that exists today has already been broken.”

Just last year, a character-based CAPTCHA developed by Microsoft and used widely for services like Hotmail, MSN, and Windows Live was broken by Jeff Yan and his colleagues at Newcastle University, in the U.K. Microsoft had previously claimed that the CAPTCHA would only let one in 10,000 machine attempts through, but Yan was able to demonstrate that his attack succeeded 60 percent of the time.

Microsoft has since enacted improvements that have made the service much more secure. Even so, Oommen Thomas believes that automatically generating joined-up handwriting could further raise the bar. His system, developed with colleagues Amalia Rusu and Venu Govindaraju, generates words by selecting characters, all handwritten, from a public database of 20,000. Algorithms are then applied to identify important control points within the characters–the key loops and arches that make the letters and numbers recognizable–before other algorithms distort the characters and link them so that they appear joined up. “We distort them randomly but make sure that they are within set limits; otherwise, they become illegible to humans,” says Oommen Thomas.