Real World Computing
The missing LINQ
This project is called The Amazon Mechanical Turk or Amazon MTurk at www.pcpro.co.uk/links/162webapps1. The name derives from a mechanical device that was built in 1769 that consisted of a model of the top half of a Turkish man that not only played chess against any opponent, but usually beat them. The doors of the box underneath could be opened to reveal a mass of cogs and gears, but in reality it turned out there was a small person concealed inside, who did the actual chess playing. Nevertheless, it fooled a lot of people at the time, including Napoleon himself.
The idea behind MTurk isn't to con people in this way, but rather to combine the power of human and mechanical (in this case, computer) efforts to achieve tasks that would be impossible using either one separately. With any new idea such as this, its usefulness is left to the developer to determine - but, for example, a website might use the system to automatically tag images with keywords or, say, to do complicated "fuzzy" data de-duplication, something that computers aren't currently good at but which humans can achieve with relative ease. People are commissioned to do the work based on a set fee per "hit", so that in the image tagging case they'd assign a keyword to each image and get paid for doing it.
I think this use of the web is an interesting development, and represents a real departure from the endless community websites we read about all the time. The next logical step is for the computer system to learn from the human responses, which can be done using inductive algorithms or neural net-type software. Imagine a computer with the ability to learn, that's connected to the internet as its memory and has the backup support of thousands of humans to supply the information it doesn't have. Now that really would be sci-fi.
Mission impossible?
Continuing with this theme of security, I came across a very neat way of carrying data around, something that anyone who has to transfer clients' data or who works in multiple locations would find useful. While laptops are fine, they're eminently nickable. USB flash drives are ideal for data transport, being lightweight and able to be protected by passwords (fingerprint-protected ones also use a password and so are similar). However, given the immensely powerful GPUs in the graphic cards fitted to modern PCs, brute-force techniques for hacking passwords have recently achieved a significant speed increase (see www.pcpro.co.uk/links/162webapps2).
So it was with great interest that I found a rugged and military-grade secure USB flash drive. This product is called IronKey (www.secure-usb.co.uk), and it stores all its data in encrypted form and has all its electronics encapsulated in epoxy resin inside a metal case. But best of all, after ten concurrent incorrect password attempts, the device self-destructs. I haven't tested this since I had to pay for my one, but I'm assured it doesn't actually explode in Mission Impossible style, which is rather disappointing but probably for the best. Oh, and it comes with a secure version of Firefox with a proxy server installed on the drive, which you can use for anonymous browsing. With one of these devices, should it get lost, you can be fairly certain you and your client's data will remain safe. Now, someone please send one to the Home Office.
