Yahoo - Gotcha!

I've always used Yahoo! Mail for all my email needs, but just lately they've decided to try and wind me up.

For some reason, every time I send an email I'm having to fill in one of those silly "Anti-spam" boxes on a web form, giving me a skewed picture with some letters hidden in it.

A little research has revealed some interesting points.

These little images are called CAPTCHAs (completely automated public Turing test to tell computers and humans apart), and they are designed to differentiate between a human user of a web form and automated "bots." They were developed by a team here.

There are several problems here, however, most notably with accessibility. They are incredibly difficult for a partially sighted person to use, and of course are impossible for a blind person using a braille terminal. They also take a whole load of time when I need to send lots of emails. The World Wide Web Consortium has published a document outlining some of the problems.

So aside from the fact that Yahoo! have just excluded a load of people from using their service, there's also the fact that Captchas are becoming less secure. Already it is possible to generate OCR programs to decipher them, and so they are having to become more and more illegible to the average user. Perhaps the most interesting article I found about the issue was found here. The article describes how spammers have been offering free access to pornography in return for deciphering captchas. Thus they bypass the problem of readability by incorporating a human!

I'm going to write to Yahoo! to complain, as soon as I can actually find a contact email address; all I can get is this screen, which is completely useless as far as making an actualy complaint is concerned...

Election

Well, it's all over, another Labour victory for the UK. It was a slight surprise given all the media reporting and all the people I know voting for something else. Looking at the results, it doesn't look as though anyone else had a real chance.
Locally, the Cambridge results were somewhat interesting, with a major shift from Labour to the Liberal Democrats this time around. This is likely to be due to the large student population in this area, to whom the Liberals particularly appealed.
This leads me to thoughts of what the local people may think. The student population is not around much more than half of the year, and virtually none of us will end up living with the results in Cambridge. We all move on in 3 years, and are given sheltered student accomodation and no need to face the wider world. If I were a Cambridge resident, would I want the student population swinging the vote?
What to do? It would be interesting to get some statistical analysis on what would change if the student votes had been counted at their homes rather than here. I think almost nothing would change at home. But what of Cambridge?