Twitter to employ CAPTCHA tweets to keep bots out

twitter-captcha

In a near dark future we may have to go this way. Have our pub­lic tweets bot proof, and the Twit­ter API return­ing base64 encoded images of our tweets instead of text, unless you’re a really good friend … then you may have some of your friends sell your plain text tweets to advert­isers, friends hack­ing friends’ accounts to har­vest more sellable tweets, etc.

Well, that’s a dark vis­ion of the future, fueled by the read­ings I’m doing for a Cyber­punk course at the Peer 2 Peer Uni­ver­sity.

Cyberpunk

Sci­ence fic­tion — before the cyber­punk split — was more or less dif­fer­ent retell­ings of the same arche­types where ali­ens replaced ghosts and mon­sters, space replaced the oceans and tech­no­logy replaced magic. This provided the grounds for sci­entific speculations, — and for a long time that was the main theme — and that was the fuel of the (tech­nical) ima­gin­a­tion of the man­kind. We reached the Moon in a story first in Kepler’s “Som­nium,” then with Jules Verne’s “From Earth to Moon.”

Con­tinue reading →