The latest xkcd proposes an alternative to the captcha anti-bot test: Matt Webb notices that it’s the Voight-Kampff test applied to the web (I have no idea how Harrison Ford managed to sound the second “f”, but apparently other people know it and have used it). I love it: focussing on what makes a human a human to weed out the bots, beyond our image-processing and language skills, concentrating on accepting interaction with entities that are capable of empathy and value judgements and can recognise the answer we’re most likely to be after.

But it doesn’t work. For one, a yes/no answer just means that a bot has to try twice instead of once, which reduces it to a problem of bandwith. But even if there was a greater choice of answers, any replicant capable of landing a job interview would surely have wifi. My phone has wifi. Even cameras have wifi now, and they would not pass many job interviews (“how do you get on with other people?”, “I click well”). The combination of connectivity and Amazon’s HIT service means that given enough time, any net-enabled replicant could just ask an army of skint humans to come up with the statistically probable answer.

Of course, the crucial element is time. For the HIT strategy to work, replicants would have to be questioned in an environment that would allow them to pause for a while before answering: this implies that they’d be best off applying for jobs in the civil service or the media, where a dilatory approach to qualifying their suitability for a role would be acceptable. Soon, Goldsmiths and Millbank would be staffed with replicants dedicated to working against all that true humans stand for, while the private sector looked on aghast and tried to concoct ways of avoiding working with either for as long as possible. So far, the story checks out: maybe wiser heads than mine are already working on a solution.

One way of avoiding the HIT approach might be to ask for responses that could only be answered through a deep knowledge of the milieu of the author: the purpose of the captcha then progresses from just weeding out bots, to weeding out people who aren’t cool enough to understand the question. In this way blogs can manage their appeal in a far more fine-grained way than at present. Serious tech blogs could bar Mac fanboys through judicious probing of their command-line fluency; political blogs could make sure that comments only come from those that articulate their allegiance in an acceptable fashion. No-one need ever hear from live-action roleplayers ever again.

But more elegant than this crude reification of web cliques would be the inclusion of a “dude this is so a trick question” button, perhaps placed elsewhere in the comments form (“was the question above totally manipulative or a fair chance to express your views?”). Perhaps in addition to the “yes” or “no” options in the two examples above, we might add a po or mu option, giving humans a chance to do what a robot can’t, at present: recognise an absurdity and claim the right to not answer.

I’m back from Perth, the wonderful city with the enormous skies and incredible stars and friendly people. Staying round the corner from William Street helped me feel not too far from home, either, with Yong Tau Foo and fresh bau available just minutes away. A combination of Paper Mario and Cottesloe beach meant I was reluctant to leave, and perhaps I wasn’t really concentrating when I finally had to, but for some reason I failed to notice my Singapore employment pass leave my possession somewhere between the surly security people and the nice Quantas people.

I think of myself as someone who never loses things, and, even though that’s not exactly accurate, I’m still not accustomed enough to losing things to have a plan for when I do. This time, though, instead of imagining the worst and hiding in the duty-free, I went directly to the immigration desk, where I was surprised to hear myself say, “I’ve lost my pass, can I still come in?”. In five months here I’ve learnt not to take the formality at face value: most people here are pretty friendly, as long as you aren’t in a rush. Ten minutes later, after a brief chat in English, Tamil and something else with the people at the empty “goods to declare” scanner, I was at the window of the police office in the secret basement of Changi Airport.

It isn’t really secret, of course: if you’re a cleaner, or official, or policeman or bus driver, or if you work in the supermarket that caters for all these people, you probably spend more time here than anywhere else. I went to the office where everyone employed to keep Changi spotless and operating gets their clearance passes from. I don’t think they have many guests: it didn’t seem dedicated to establishing a relationship between you and them in the way of most public offices. It was more like the Lego sandwich shop I had when I was small: tiny, compact, everything you needed was there, but you wouldn’t really expect it to be arranged that way in real life. The bench for two people was next to the lockers, which were next to the desk serving as a kind of reception area: all of these were behind an area maybe a metre and a half wide, which was mainly taken up with slots for every pass used in the airport. Seventeen-year-olds with acne and guns hung around making jokes about missing the coffee run. The officer at the front desk had a hole in his sock; his colleague left the office as I sat on the chair they brought for me, stuffing his rigid nylon jacket with Panini football stickers.

I was there to file a lost item report, so I could take it to the Ministry of Manpower and try and get hold of a replacement pass. I was dealt with by an officer (in the UK I would say boy, and try and make you think of his clear skin and open smile, but here that word means something else) who asked me to write my addresses on a clipboard, so he could be sure of what he was writing into the “Frontline Officer CompUterised System”. While I was waiting I looked around the office: hospital numbers on the wall, the username and password (“police123″) for the computer he was using, a list of common offences and the relevant penal codes. There’s a myth the t-shirt sellers here are keen to propagate, that Singaporean law will have you for the most trivial offences, but these looked reasonable, or at least like their British equivalent, although worded strangely to my ears. My personal favourite was “Mischief”, which, unlike carrying a gun-shaped lighter, is a non-seizable offence in Singapore.

The report was ready, each copy stamped appropriately and signed twice, and each time he’d entered something he’d turned the screen so I could approve it: procedure, I’m sure, but it was novel to have someone seem to care that they’d got it right. The printer was old and grimy, and seeing the chipped pastel paint behind it I had a tiny revelation. On the plane I’d been reading W. Somerset-Maugham and Paul Theroux, and although I lack the quiet despair of one, or the gallant seediness of the other, for a moment I thought I’d been somewhere they might have written about.

I’m surprised at myself, wanting to contribute to the fuss about flickr insisting on our using Yahoo! IDs to sign in. Still, I am upset, I’m not happy about using my Yahoo ID, even though I believe it’ll be pretty straightforward. It’s not so much that I resent having the myth of flickr as a groovy startup finally laid to rest, it’s that I actively work hard to avoid the kind of online experience Yahoo offer. And I’m amazed that flickr don’t seem to have been able to take time off from spouting about user-centred business practices at conferences around the world to manage the whole thing a bit more sympathetically.

I was pleased when they sold to someone: the extra money they made is, I believe, what means the site still works. And I don’t have any doubt that it’ll be easier to manage a single sign-on system rather than two. And I can’t really get annoyed about a lot of these complaints, even though I’ve got some sympathy with them. I just don’t like the tone of the place anymore. God knows, the cutesy ironic knitting-circle wholegrain birkenstock liberal insular literate me-too middle-class self-righteousness of the place annoyed me royally, but at least it was genuine, and at least it seemed pretty consistent across the site. I don’t understand the way people comment, any more: I used to know what the forums were for, and trust that everyone else did too. Now, although it’s hardly on the scale of an endless September, there are more people around who don’t seem to think about it the same way, and that stops me wanting to play. Not even going to talk about the nauseating “People who use Flickr rock!” rubbish spawned by the marketing droids, either.

Mind you, anything that reminds me to take a backup of my pictures has to be a good thing.

[Some more comment: the usually perceptive Anil Dash loyally claims not to understand why the "old skool" are upset; /. commentors sneer at the crying crybabies; Suw Charman puts it better than I could;Andre Torrez points out that 5% of your earliest adopters is still a lot of important people.]

It occured to me that I tend to talk a lot around here, and while it’s true that no-one else is going to do it for me, it might get a bit monotonous. So I made something to change the tone a bit.

If you can make one that’s less scary you could let me know.

Text alert lighter,
originally uploaded by kokeshi.

One of the things about being in a pub is you can hear the noise of other people talking around you. Most of the time you can’t make out individual words, or who’s speaking, but you can gauge the level of conversation: there’s a kind of transparency to the social interactions going on around you.

Of course, now that everyone’s stopped leaving their mobiles out on the table, there’s a whole other kind of background social noise that you can’t hear now. I don’t really need to see what people are texting each other, but it’s nice to know how much attention people are giving to other channels of communication.

So I was really taken with this lighter of Steve’s that he found for 20p in Sarajevo. As well as lighting cigarettes, it also illuminates the SMS hubbub: every time someone round the table gets a text or a call, the lights flash. A lighter’s a nice choice for this kind of behaviour: for such an anti-social habit, smoking has a lot of social interaction associated with it, and lighters on the table tend to be public property, at least for the duration of the stay.