Google has been inappropriately storing your search records for a long time now, but it looks like they're far from being the only one.

Not long ago, we learned that CAPTCHAs were being broken by people using pornography to motivate live humans to enter code after code. While very annoying, it was a very clever way of defeating the CAPTCHAs and made spammers day.

Now we see another brilliant use of CAPTCHAs in the restoration of old text too obscured for machines to read.

A team of computer scientists has taken a common Internet tool for screening out spam and adapted it to help convert text from old books and manuscripts into electronic files. The effort might not put professional transcribers out of business, but it could cut the cost of creating digital libraries

After a year of operation, reCAPTCHA has helped resolve about 440 million words for client users that are digitizing newspaper and document archives; von Ahn says his team just completed the entire 1908 archive from The New York Times, for example.

This is a very clever use of what would normally be wasted time similar to the idea of distributed computing as in the SETI@home project.

(H/T to Slashdot for the link)

Wow. Talk about scum!

These informercials are pretending to be news so you'll give them far more credibility that you would if you knew it was an informercial.

That's pretty low, but not unexpected from this type of company.

Now here's a state with a Attorney General worth his salt! Richard Blumenthal is suing Countrywide and Bank of America for deceptive lending and is looking for some serious monetary damages to be paid out to the victims. This single move could save thousands of people from forclosures and distress. That's some serious protecting of the innocent. Way to go!

I found this online petition to remove Pelosi for failing to do her job and being a political hack. Even if Congress couldn't pull an actual impeachment (which I believe they could for trying to block investigations of the White House staff alone), then they could still do something.

Make sure you also support Dennis Kucinich's petition for impeachment hearings for Bush and Cheney!

Of course, I believe some of the blame should go to the Ohio elections people, but I can't fault them for being pulled in by slick salesguys (if that's what actually happened). Either way, at least they're fessing up and making sure to hold Diebold accountable for their flop.

The touch-screen voting setup used in half of Ohio's 88 counties doesn't work properly, and the former Diebold Election Systems should pay as a result, Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner said in a court filing yesterday.

Well duh. Better yet, they should scrap the system and get something that actually works. In theory, my state has which is good since I'd hate to be blocked from voting again this year.

So much for "Fakeproof". Of course, anyone who knows about RFID and the way they work could see this coming.

CNN has a story covering four of the new annoying fees you might see at the airport and how you might be able to avoid them. But then there's this…

By the way, there's plenty of evidence that the airlines are just getting started with their new fees. Once passengers are used to paying for beverages, checked luggage and "free" award tickets, it's on to bigger and better things for the chronically mismanaged airline industry.

What's next? No one knows.

And that's a very good reason to follow this advice:

Of course, the best way around all of these fees is to fly on an airline that doesn't have them. Southwest Airlines still allows you to check two bags at no extra charge. JetBlue still serves free drinks and snacks and charges $25 less than the big airlines for unaccompanied minors. Supporting these less fee-prone companies will hasten the inevitable demise of the airlines that erroneously believe they can surcharge their way back to a profit.

It's important to note here that Southwest is the only profitable airline and they've never had to stoop to this. Go figure.

(H/T to The Consumerist for the link)

It's important to know that in this case, the spy had physical access to the machine and there was a light that came on to tell the victim that the webcam was active. However, you should always be careful if you have a webcam installed to cover or turn it when not in use.

Health and life insurance companies have access to a powerful new tool for evaluating whether to cover individual consumers: a health "credit report" drawn from databases containing prescription drug records on more than 200 million Americans.

It's important to know that these prescription reports and others like it are not regulated at all while credit reporting companies are heavily regulated, and still are a problem sometimes.

The TSA's CLEAR program where people can spend $100 to be "pre-screened" at airports and bypass security had a security hit recently when a laptop (doesn't this get old) with customer data was stolen.

Well gosh, how could they ever have seen that coming?

Anyway, Schneier covers the story and links to the TSA's response as well as taking a moment to denounce the program again along with most of what the TSA is doing for airport security. Since I've met the privacy officer for the TSA and know he knows what he's doing, the only reason I can come up with for this is that they're not listening to him when he's telling them not to put this kind of data on laptops unencrypted.

No more free drinks for you.

In the mad rush to create a value-adding product at the expense of privacy (wow, where have we heard that before?), Google execs failed to consider that they too might be on the losing end of Google Streetview. A privacy group has just released a ton of personal information that could cause all kinds of problems for Google exec Larry Page. The key is that the information was gathered only from Google Streetview and in about 30 minutes.

Hopefully it will lead to positive changes to the service, but it's far more likely to lead to an obscuring of just the Google execs' data.

Schneier covers the recently released US policy for laptop seizure:

The U.S. government has published its policy: they can take your laptop anywhere they want, for as long as they want, and share the information with anyone they want

Oy. So what does it take to end this horrible trend? Obama? McCain (not likely)? Or something else entirely, and, if so, what?

Schneier covers two videos explaining why it's a bad idea to say anything to police when arrested or investigated.

The first video is a law school professor explaining why he's proud to say he will never talk to a police officer under any circumstances. Here are some highlights:

• There are tens of thousands of federal crimes. Many of which are so broad, you could be convicted under completely bogus circumstances.
• Example: If the IRS just wants to "Ask you a few questions" you say no unless they grant you immunity
• There is NO way it can help you. But even if you tell the absolute truth and are totally innocent, there are many ways it can hurt you.

The neat thing is that he gave up half his time to an expert law-enforcement interviewer. The second video is of that expert interviewer explaining some of the tips and tricks he uses to get people to talk. Highlights include:

• Any cop can follow you for a time and find a legitimate violation to pull you over for
• He'll come into the room with a stack of papers with a videotape on top (so they think there's a video) and just start doing paperwork. Because people hate silence, eventually the suspect will start talking
• He brings in a tape recorder and eventually says, "I want to talk to you off the record" and he turns it off. The thing is there's no such thing as "off the record" and every word in an interrogation room is recorded.
• While you may technically be innocent until proven guilty, a jury assumes that if you're sitting next to a defense attorney, you have a reason to be there.
• If you didn't know already, police are allowed to lie in interviews

The last thing he stressed which seemed supported by the rest of his talk was that he never tries to send an innocent person to jail. Which so long as the interviewer your talking to has that same viewpoint is very comforting. Since you can't know their intentions, I think it's safer to take the first guy's advice and not talk to the police without representation.

The Georgia law caps fees for freezing or unfreezing credit records at $3, lower than most states, and requires the service to be free for people over age 65. The law also requires credit bureaus to lift the freeze within 15 minutes when a customer makes a request to buy big-ticket items like cars and TVs using credit.

Not bad at all. The only way the terms could have been better is if the freezes were entirely free.

Just to prove once again that California is one of the most progressive states for protecting consumers, a judge there has ruled against Sprint in a class-action lawsuit involving Early Termination Fees.

The lawsuit claimed that the fees did not offset the cost of phones and were instead used only to lock people into a contract. The judge agreed.

Go California!

This is one of the funniest and geekiest things I've seen a while. Chances are less computer oriented people won't enjoy it as much, but I thought it was hilarious. I needed after the last post.

This makes me sick. Bush has tried to attach a provision to a bill that would allow him to escape prosecution for his war crimes. How's that for an admission of guilt?