Brandon Corbins Head Indianapolis Product & Technology Evangelist

Do you know what a Captcha is? I am sure you have dealt with them, but I bet most of you don’t know what their purpose is. Unfortunately, there are a lot of programmers out there that write “bots” that are small little programs that run on a computer and scourer websites trying to find vulnerabilities in order to take control of the site. A webpage with a form is the most vulnerable - a lot of wanna-be-developers do not understand the fundamentals of how data flows, and because of that, they make it fairly easy to inject code in to a website form and obliterate their entire database. Scary shit, to say the least.

In order to protect ourselves from these malicious form posting robots, we will show the website user an image that only a human can decipher, the human then responds with the answer (in this case filling out the form for what letters you see), and then we know you are not a bot.

But I see a bigger problem here than just a simple database delete - instead I see the fundamental problem of “here comes the robots”.

This need to protect ourselves is due evil geeks - they are the people who take great ideas and intentions and twist them for their own use or to cause chaos in general. Sure, this doesn’t seem to have as much of an impact on humanity when its only a website. Where it gets a bit hairy however, is when these people inevitably get access to technology (geek trickle down effect) that will far surpass our own brain by an unspeakable amount.

Imagine when IBM finishes the Blue Brain Project (reverse-engineering the human brain down to each neuron), and plugs that beast in to the Internet. What would an “All-knowing” entity do when “it” saw the horror that we humans have created in our short span on this planet? Our destruction, our incessant need to find an enemy and kill them, or our incalculable number of killings simply because someone “is wrong” when “we were right”. Back to iRobot again…

Even in our short technical existence, we already have to “fight” our own technology, it’s a fairly easy and steady fight because the “good geeks” and the “bad geeks” all relatively have the same mental capacity. But mark my words, the fight is going to get a whole lot harder when we are up against programs that can out smart us by 1000 to 1.