Fiber Fix and CAPTCHA Tricks

I'm planning to post on consumer-owned fiber in more detail, later, but I wanted to respond to Nikki's post at TechRepublican. Talking about the FCC's ruling that reprimanded Comcast for strangling P2P traffic, Nikki said,

It's tempting to fall back on our old friend Let The Market Decide. After all, if Comcast throttles BitTorrent traffic, the BitTorrent folks use a different ISP, Comcast loses market share, and eventually it changes policy. Voila: market signals triumph, seed rates soar, and everyone gets a pony.

But it's not a free market.

Most Americans are confronted with a duopoly (at best) when choosing broadband providers, and the infrastructure is so expensive that it's hard to break into the market. Without meaningful competition, consumers can't push for better service. I can get my high-speed Internet from Comcast, with all its attendant issues, or I can use dial-up.

Happily, consumer owned cables could make competition among ISPs possible. This article from Ars Technica lays out the basics of the idea.

In this plan, consumers would own the "last mile" of high speed fiber cable that linked their house to the larger fiber bundle. Since ISPs could enter a market for the lower start up cost of installing a main pipeline, rather that connecting up hundreds of houses. If consumers are linked to two pipelines and can decide, month to month, which provider they prefer, the ISPs will actually have to compete with one another. More on this, later.

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Meanwhile, this Ars Technica article is just straight-up awesome. When scanning old or damaged texts, researchers are often frustrated, as the computers are unable to acurately read many words. Now, those researchers are outsourcing the job to humans in the form of CAPTCHAs.

CAPTCHAs (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart) are used to make sure the person filling out an online form is really a human. (The word verifications that blogger uses are a prime example). Since only humans can accurately identify these scanned words, the researchers can correct errors without anyone having to do additional work.

(Neat Bonus: these recycled CAPTCHAs (reCAPTCHAs) are actually better at filtering out bots than ordinary CAPTCHAs, since the distortions introduced by the scanning process are not the result of pure mathematical formulas, and are harder to undo.)