iBose

Oracle Acquires Sun

Just read the news.Oracle to buy Sun for $ 7.4 Billion or $ 5.6 Billion net of Sun's cash and debt.After the deal with IBM didn't worked out everyone was eager to know about who's the next.So the next came Larry Ellison and he seems to be the final one.As per Mr. Ellison

"The acquisition of Sun transforms the IT industry, combining best-in-class enterprise software and mission-critical computing systems,"

Read details of the news at Reuters:

http://www.reuters.com/article/companyNews/idUKTRE53J2HI20090420

On the other hand Reuters reports that Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer is taken by sheer surprise with breaking of this news.He said

"I just learnt it ... I need to think about it. I am very surprised,"

In the days to come we will see how Oracle handles with different businesses of Sun.Sustains,Transforms or Destroys.Tech experts and journalists seemed to most worried about Sun's hardware business as it does not match with Oracles all existing line of business.Next subject of great worry is MySQL.This open source database has become increasingly popular overtime under the patronage of Sun.MySQL in that way clashes with Oracle's Oracle the core the database business.So will it be wise for them to continue to support an open source product which is a competitor to some extent of their own flagship product?

Let's see......

CAPTCHA and Latest Innovation

So what is CAPTCHA? CAPTCHA is derived from the word "capture" but also is a contrived acronym of "Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computer and Humans Apart" .This is normally used to differentiate between human users from software programs (robots) in today's web based systems like Emails,Forums,Wiki's,Blogs etc.The main objective is to prevent software robots spamming these respective web based systems with mal content.So when we try to register with a website or post comment in a blog we are asked to enter a series of characters (usually mix of alphabets and number) displayed in a distorted fashion.This distortion and noise is added to ensure that only human intelligence can properly read and understand it.

This text based scheme has two issues - a) language dependence and data entry.This needs to be culture aware for human users to understand it properly and then data needs to manually keyed into the system.Google has recently released a research paper which overcomes these problems of text based recognition.This CAPTCHA technique is based upon identification of upright orientation of images.

The major challenge involved in this task is to remove the set of images that

• Are easy for automated orientation detection systems to identify
• Hard for human beings to identify proper orientation

To know about how it is done checkout the paper:

http://www.richgossweiler.com/projects/rotcaptcha/rotcaptcha.pdf

Let's see when we will find this in the web pages we use as netizens.

This seems to be big step for the fight against SPAM.