A typical reCAPTCHA

Both CAPTCHA (which stands for Completely Automated Public Turing Test to Tell Computers and Humans Apart) and reCAPTCHA are the invention of Luis von Ahn, a Carnegie Mellon computer scientist and MacArthur "genius grant" recipient. "A couple hundred million CAPTCHAs are typed daily around the world," von Ahn tells NEWSWEEK. "The first time I did the calculations, I felt quite proud. And then I felt bad because people really find these annoying." They're also wasteful. It takes about 10 seconds to type a CAPTCHA─more, obviously, if you err and have to start over─meaning a total of some 500,000 human hours per day are spent typing them in. As a point of comparison, according to von Ahn, the Empire State Building took 7 million human hours to build. "Life is only like 700,000 hours," he says. "It's almost the equivalent of a life. We thought, is there any way we can use this human effort in a way that's good for humanity?"

Turns out, there is.

Has Windows Vista reached out from the grave to foul things up one last time? Judging by lower-than-expected PC sales off the back of the Oct. 22 Windows 7 launch, it would appear so.

Usually, when Microsoft ships a new operating system, a flood of new PC purchases follows. But despite glowing reviews and brisk sales of its own (pre-orders beat Harry Potter's record in the U.K., according to Amazon), Windows 7 boosted PC sales only 49 percent in its first week. That's not shabby for any industry in a recession. But it's well below the 68 percent spike that attended Vista's debut in 2006. PC makers and retailers were counting on a huge bump to kick off the holiday buying season early.

What caused the discrepancy?

Every day tens of millions of people log on to Facebook, the popular social-network site, and spend time playing goofy online games. But watch out. Some people playing these games are getting fleeced by scammers, tricked into signing up for products and services they didn’t want.

Worse yet, this isn’t happening by accident. The companies that develop games for Facebook make big money by selling ad space—some of it to scammers. 

This week, Silicon Valley blogger Michael Arrington caused a ruckus by suggesting that Facebook itself has been turning a blind eye to the scams because it is sharing in the spoils. Arrington, who runs the influential TechCrunch blog, is on a crusade to pressure Facebook to clean up its act.

After Atari popularized the joystick in 1977, videogame developers spent years cramming more buttons onto the controller. Then along came Nintendo, with a motion-sensing controller for its Wii console that was less complicated, and more fun. Since Nintendo launched the Wii in 2006, it has sold more than 50 million units worldwide--about as many as its two rivals, Microsoft's Xbox 360 and Sony's PlayStation 3, combined. 

As any fan of Super Mario Bros. knows, however, invincibility only lasts so long. In the first half of 2009, Nintendo profits fell 52 percent to $772 million, dragged down by a 43 percent decline in Wii sales. "The Wii has stalled," CEO Satoru Iwata told investors, citing a gap in the pipeline of must-have games.

Iwata should be worried about more than game development. Nintendo's archrivals, Microsoft and Sony, are poised to release their own motion-sensing devices in 2010, with Microsoft having the best chance to out-Wii the Wii. Its Project Natal product, announced in June, eliminates the controller entirely--instead of a player holding a gadget, a special device mounted beneath the TV uses a video camera, an infrared sensor, and software to identify a player's motions. The gamer's actual silhouette, not a generic avatar, can then be inserted directly into games.

I played an early prototype of Natal in May, and it makes the Wii controller's capabilities, once a breakthrough, seem crude.

Last month Microsoft rolled out Windows 7 and opened the first of a chain of new retail stores. As usual with such announcements, there's been loads of hoopla and ginned-up excitement. But mostly people are just relieved. Windows 7 replaces Vista, one of the most disastrous tech products ever. It also caps the end of a decade in which Microsoft's founder, Bill Gates, stepped aside, and the company lost its edge.

Ten years ago, when Gates appointed his longtime second in command, Steve Ballmer, as his replacement as CEO, Microsoft was still the meanest, mightiest tech company in the world, a juggernaut that bullied friends and foes alike and which possessed an operating-system franchise that was practically a license to print money. Techies likened Microsoft to the Borg on Star Trek, the evil collective that insatiably assimilates everything around it, with the slogan, "Resistance is futile."

That was then. Now, instead of being scary, Microsoft has become a bit of a joke. Yes, its Windows operating system still runs on more than 90 percent of PCs, and the Office application suite rules the desktop. But those are old markets. In new areas, Microsoft has stumbled.

Read the full column >>

Apple's latest operating system, known as "Snow Leopard," resolved dozens of headaches for users. But it may herald a new one for the company's marketing team: trying to come up with yet another big-cat name for the next version of the OS. After Cheetah, Puma, Jaguar, Panther, Tiger, and two types of Leopards, are there any more marquee felines left to poach? Yes, but none that Apple is likely to want.

The custom of naming new versions of its fast, virus-resistant OS after outsize cats dates to 2001, when Apple coined the internal code names "Cheetah" and "Puma" for versions 10.0 and 10.1. The first update to be publicly given big-cat status was "Jaguar," and from there the cage door swung open. But the latest name change—from Leopard to Snow Leopard—was so subtle that some people started wondering if Apple's pride was running thin. True, leopards and snow leopards are different species, and Apple's decision probably had more to do with the fact that Snow Leopard is a minor upgrade than fears of a branding crisis. But the question remains: has Apple backed itself into a corner—and can it claw its way out?

With almost 40 different species of wild cat in the "Felidae" family tree, it might seem like Apple has plenty of options left. But a closer look at the remaining big-pawed population—which is limited to lynx, cougar, bobcat, lion, and a litter box of lesser kitties—suggests it might be time to for Apple to move on to another type of beast.

A review of the options:

One of the many mind-boggling statistics about Facebook—300 million members, half log in daily, 8 billion minutes of use per day—is that the social network also happens to be the Web's largest photo-sharing service. By a lot. Earlier this month Flickr announced that it had received its 4 billionth upload, total; Facebook is up to 2 billion a month.

Facebook's big advantage, of course, is that it lets you tag your Facebook friends in images, sending alerts rippling throughout the social network. The interface is snappy, and integration with mobile devices like the BlackBerry and iPhone is superb. Since pretty much everyone you know is on Facebook, it has become the default place to share albums of birthday parties, vacations, and the like.

But one big drawback to Facebook photos has always been that they are shown in relatively poor resolution—about 600 by 600 pixels. That's so-so for onscreen viewing, but poor for bigger displays, HDTVs, and (especially) printing. So far, as the statistics attest, that hasn't been a big liability. But Facebook will be integrated into the next version of the Xbox Live platform, bringing the social network onto gigantic HDTVs. Microsoft gave me an early look at the feature, and photos there look OK, but not spectacular.

This mediocre image quality also limits third-party book-printing services—such as Pixable, a promising startup that lets users easily make hard- and soft-cover albums out of Facebook photos. Pixable's killer feature is that you're not limited to your own photos—it will grab any image that you'd normally have permission to see on Facebook.com. The service also automatically grabs information like tagged names, captions, "likes," and comments. It's a great concept, but the biggest printed images Pixable users can get out of Facebook's 600 x 600 limit is five by seven inches.

When the Barnes & Noble Nook e-book reader was announced last week, I wrote about the company's strategy to beat out Amazon's Kindle by making B&N e-books available on many different devices, giving customers more places to buy and read their books. It only took a couple of days before Amazon followed suit and announced it too was making a Kindle app for PCs. Versions for Mac and BlackBerry are supposedly in the works.

Choice is good. But Marion Maneker over at The Big Money argues that while the Kindle helps Amazon's business, if the Nook turns out to be a big hit it could wind up hurting Barnes & Noble. As book prices fall due to heavy discounting, it is becoming harder for the bookseller to support its expensive stores and many employees. The Nook may make the problem worse by robbing sales from the company's physical bookstores while setting an expectation among its customers for cheaper books.

Maneker writes:

"Amazon has established the idea of $9.99 e-books, especially for best-sellers ... On the most heavily trafficked titles, BN.com will have to spend money to keep up the $9.99 price point. But Amazon has mountains of cash from its other businesses to support this; B&N does not. The physical stores don’t generate enough profit for that. Meanwhile, those stores are getting beat up by Wal-Mart, Target, and Amazon, as they establish a $9 price for the biggest best-selling titles."

It will be interesting to see how B&N tries to get around this. Does it shutter many of its physical stores and move more toward becoming an online and e-book seller? Or does it find a way to use its physical bookstores to offer customers an "experience" that online stores can't?

Found in the press room of the official Windows 7 launch event in Manhattan: a reminder of why we're all very, very glad to be rid of Vista.

...

Mention Polish Jews and you'll likely think of death camps and ghettoes. The four-month-old Virtual Shtetl Web site tells much, much more about the 1,000 years of Jewish history in Poland—a country that once offered the community religious refuge in medieval times and later became home to the world's biggest Jewish community. Like so many others in Europe, that community was almost obliterated during World War II. Virtual Shtetl creator Albert Stankowski knows it will never come back, but he hopes the site will at least resurrect some of it online. Stankowski likes to call the site a museum without walls—a multimedia precursor to the 2012 completion of Warsaw's long-anticipated Museum of the History of Polish Jews. But the shtetl site is more treasure trove than institutional preview. Its key feature: wiki technology enabling registered users to contribute memories, documents, and photos to the bilingual (English and Polish) site. The result is a portal where both Jews and non-Jews of Polish descent are collaborating to create a rich new archive of a millennium of Polish Jewry. Holocaust survivors and their descendants are contributing pictures of lives wiped out by the Nazis. Current residents, freed from Soviet revisionist history, are offering information on what formerly Jewish towns (shtetls) look like now. They're helping to relocate desecrated cemeteries damaged by the Germans and provide GPS coordinates to vanished places of interest.

On Monday I wrote about the new Barnes & Noble e-book reader, called the Nook, and how it is part of a larger strategy by the bookseller to topple Amazon. Now the Nook is official, and hardwarewise, it certainly makes the Kindle seem even dowdier and less exciting than it already did, if that's even possible.

No doubt Amazon will hit back with an even better Kindle next time around, and then Apple will weigh in with its rumored Nook'nKindle killer tablet in a few months─and so it goes. The good news is, all this competition will mean better (and cheaper) devices and e-books for all of us. If there was ever a doubt that e-books would eventually go mainstream, that's now been settled.

Yet there are those who still have doubts about leaving paper behind. Some of the misgivings about e-books are easy to understand. The e-readers and a lot of the books themselves still cost too much; and most commercial e-books are shackled with stupid DRM restrictions that severely limit the way customers can use them, much the way MP3s were once locked up before record labels finally realized they were fighting a losing battle.

But now comes a new complaint about e-books that, I must admit, had never occurred to me before: They are the equivalent of Nazis. In the October issue of the Evergreen Review, novelist and poet Alan Kaufman writes that the promoters of e-books are plotting to kill paper books the way Hitler plotted to kill Jews. He goes on to say that─wait, you know what? I can't do justice to the sublime lunacy of this piece by paraphrasing. Excerpts:

The book is fast becoming the despised Jew of our culture. Der Jude is now Der Book. Hi-tech propogandists [sic] tell us that the book is a tree-murdering, space-devouring, inferior form of technology; that society would simply be better-off altogether if we euthanized it even as we begin to carry around, like good little Aryans, whole libraries in our pockets, downloaded on the Uber-Kindle.

... As to the bookstore, it is like the synagogue under Hitler: the house of a doomed religion. And the paper book is its Torah and gravestone: a thing to burn, or use to pave the road to internet heaven.

At this point one might point out that no one is arguing that paper books should be abolished. One might also note the irony of Kaufman's choice of forum, using a magazine Web site to rave against the evils of reading on a screen. But one senses Kaufman does not have much of an ear for irony.

Instead, let us return to the text for his rousing conclusion. The spread of e-books is, he writes, "... a catastrophe of holocaustal proportions. And its endgame is the disappearance of not just books but of all things human."

Well, OK. But the Nook has a color touchscreen, which you have to admit is pretty slick.

When it comes to icons of the environmentalist movement, Stewart Brand ranks at the top of the list. Brand, 70, founded the Whole Earth Catalog, which helped to mold the counterculture of the 1970s. Today, though, he's just released a new book, Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto, in which he makes a U-turn into much of the movement's received wisdom. Perhaps the biggest about-face concerns his embrace of nuclear power. NEWSWEEK's Andrew Bast sat down with Brand in New York to talk about the atom, the environment, and the dire ramifications of napping on a tugboat. Excerpts:

NEWSWEEK: Is nuclear power green?

BRAND: Yes. Having been careful not to look into nuclear power for many years, when I began considering it I thought it was green primarily in the context of greenhouse gases and climate change. But frankly, now I've gotten to the point now that even if carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, greenhouse gases, and climate change were not significant issues, I would still probably be pro-nuclear. Because coal is so awful.

Is it fair to compare the remnants of coal-fired power plans with nuclear waste?

The waste from coal means gigatons of carbon dioxide going into the atmosphere. There is also the fly ash, slurry, and all the rest of the stuff. The sheer quantities get to be overwhelming. Eighty rail cars a day of coal, each one weighing a hundred tons goes into a 1-gigawatt coal-fired plant, and that multiplies to 19,000 tons of carbon dioxide, every day. Compare that to one year of a 1-gigawatt nuclear plant, which puts out 20 tons of very dense nuclear waste that goes into dry cask storage. You know exactly where it is and you monitor it, and it's not doing anything bad. That's a pretty strong contrast.

In the book, you tally up the anti-nuke environmentalists who have changed their minds. Is there a definitive line in the environmental movement to embrace nuclear power?

You can name the prominent figures on two hands and two feet. The one I like, because it is so clear, is Stephen Tydnall in Britain, who was head of Greenpeace there. Today, Britain is headed toward an environmentally permitted, if not actually encouraged, nuclear renaissance. And they've got France right across the channel selling them 2 gigawatts a year of nuclear electricity!

You were trained originally as an ecologist, so maybe it's easy for you to think about long eras like 10,000 years. But for many people, whether it's nuclear power plants, waste from coal-fired plants, or climate change, it's hard to think beyond much more than the time they've got before, well, they're part of the earth, too.

If we got most of civilization comfortable thinking in a hundred-year time frame, that would be a fantastic victory. Climate change may do this. But that is jumping up from a situation where people can barely think seriously about a decade at a time. Mostly we're focusing on the next quarter, the next election, and that's fine. But one of the things we hire government and scientists to do is to step outside that time frame, bear it in mind, operate within it, but keep the century in mind.

There is a lot of buzz that Barnes & Noble will release its anticipated e-reading device tomorrow. If the usual rumor sites are to be believed, it will have an e-ink screen, like Amazon's Kindle, and it will have built-in wireless so you can buy books over the air, like the Kindle. It may do the Kindle one better with a touchscreen, and possibly Wi-Fi, and maybe some limited way of sharing books with other e-readers.

Maybe it will be better than the Kindle. Maybe it will be pretty much the same. Gizmodo posted some photos of the thing this week. It looks just fine. There is the customary hype over the device─you know, whether it's a "Kindle killer," etc.

But the truth is, as long as it isn't a complete disaster, it doesn't really matter. Barnes & Noble is clearly out to get Amazon, but it's also clearly not counting on this device alone to do it. Instead, while the Kindle, and the Kindle 2, and the Kindle DX  have been getting all the attention, B&N has been quietly sneaking up to steal Amazon's lunch.

E-books have been around for years, but never caught on. Amazon deserves a lot of credit for doing something no one had been able to do before: create a format for e-books that was attractive to a mainstream audience. People who own Kindles generally love them, and buy a lot of books from Amazon to read on them.

But many people who might become avid e-readers don't own Kindles─because they're too expensive; or too clunky; or because they don't like the many user-crippling restrictions Amazon places on what customers can do with its e-books (you buy them but you don't really own them); or because they don't want to lug around yet another limited use device along with their cell phone and iPod and laptop.

And this is where Amazon may have gotten itself into trouble. It's a bookseller, not a device maker, and forcing customers to buy the company's reader in order to read its e-books means Amazon has a lot fewer customers for them. Amazon seemed to recognize this, and brought out a decent but stripped down Kindle app for the iPhone and iPod touch. But still, it's a fairly closed universe for customers who want to buy Kindle content.

Meanwhile Barnes &  Noble has been doing just the opposite. Instead of trying to convince its customers to lock themselves into a proprietary device, the company has been working to make it so they can buy and read B&N's e-books on devices they may already have in their pockets, or on their desktops. As it is now, you can read them on a Mac or PC computer, iPhone or iPod Touch, or BlackBerry phone. (There have been hints at the possibility of an app for Android phones, but so far it hasn't materialized.) The reader application is free, so there's no need to plunk down hundreds on a device before you can plunk down more money to read on it.

The company has also signed a deal to provide the e-books for the long-awaited Plastic Logic Que e-reader expected early next year. Add Barnes & Noble's own branded device, and customers have a lot of choices. If you want a dedicated e-reader, they've got one. If you want to do your e-reading on a handheld device you already own, or sitting at your desk or on your notebook, you can do that too. All of a sudden, the Kindle starts to fade by comparison. Things could get really interesting if Apple's forthcoming tablet─I know, it's just a rumor─runs both Amazon's and Barnes & Noble's e-reading apps. 

If B&N allows customers to swap their libraries between devices and share books they've purchased with others─and they should─they'll attract even more customers. (Don't hold your breath for DRM-free e-books in the short run, though. Publishers are still foolishly demanding punitive restrictions on how their customers can use the e-books they buy, and retailers like Amazon and Barnes & Noble are going along with it. Give it time, though. Just like the music labels did, publishers will eventually wise up once they realize that they're losing customers and leaving a ton of money on the table by shackling their content.)

B&N's strategy reminds me of a great recent piece in Wired by Daniel Roth about Netflix CEO Reed Hastings, who had big plans to manufacture a device that would stream Netflix movies into customers'  television sets. But days away from launching the product, he was in fits of self doubt. Something didn't seem right. Ultimately, he pulled the plug on the set-top box and went in an entirely different direction.

Roth writes: "Instead, the company would take a more stealthy—and potentially even more ambitious—approach. Rather than design its own product, it would embed its streaming-video service into existing devices: TVs, DVD players, game consoles, laptops, even smart phones. Netflix wouldn't be a hardware company; it would be a services firm....

"Today, nearly 3 million users access Netflix's instant streaming service, watching an estimated 5 million movies and TV shows every week on their PCs or living room sets. They get it through Roku's player, which was successfully launched in May 2008. (The Roku now also offers more than 45,000 movies and TV shows on demand through Amazon.com and, since August, live and archived Major League Baseball games.) They get it through their Xbox 360s—Microsoft added Netflix to its Xbox Live service last fall. They get it through LG and Samsung Blu-ray players. They get it through their TiVos and new flatscreen TVs. By the end of 2009, nearly 10 million Netflix-equipped gadgets will be hanging on walls and sitting in entertainment centers. And Hastings says this is just the beginning: `It's possible that within a few years, nearly all Internet-connected consumer electronics devices will include Netflix.' "

If that's the sort of thing Barnes & Noble has in mind, Amazon has plenty to fear, and a lot of catching up to do.