mCaptcha, Blockchain Interoperability, Social Media Censorship
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Earlier this month, the Nobel Prize highlighted the impact of AI systems on research across disciplines and their potential for shaping the future of science. We are in an era where advancements in AI - and computing as a whole - are happening every second.
In this edition, we feature three articles from CACM on fascinating topics: cybersecurity, blockchain interoperability, and online censorship. Dive in now!
Although captchas can add an extra layer of security, they often contain flaws that make them vulnerable to attacks. For example, South African threat actors Automated Libra used captcha to open up several GitHub accounts, eliminating the need for human intervention. A group of scientists from Arizona, Florida, and Georgia came up with an ML-based captcha decoder that they claim can solve 94.4% of the real-world captcha challenges in dark networks.?And a malware campaign has been uncovered that uses a creative captcha challenge to deceive visitors into installing the Gozi banking trojan.?The appearance of attacks like these illustrate how challenging it is to create a safe captcha. But even outside of these high-tech attacks, captchas can be bypassed with the help of captcha farms,?where a human’s skill in solving the puzzles can be obtained via an easy API call.
In this Research and Advances article, authors Aravinth Manivannan, Sibi Chakkaravarthy Sethuraman , and Devi Priya Vimala Sudhakaran present mCaptcha, a variable-difficulty-based proof-of-work captcha system that does not harm the Web user’s experience, cause accessibility issues, or jeopardize security.
Many systematizations of knowledge appeared from 2016 to 2021 (namely 11), highlighting new categories of solutions: sidechains (2015/2016), blockchain-of-blockchains (2016/2017), relays (2019), blockchain-agnostic protocols (2019/2020), solutions for the enterprise (2019/2020), and even preliminary techniques for blockchain migration (2020). Since then, the focus has been on generalization, standardization, and refinement of existing techniques (see Belchior et al). A visible trend is on orchestrating arbitrary logic spanning across centralized and decentralized infrastructure to realize the following interoperability modes acting on the semantic layer.
Join authors Rafael Belchior , Jan Sü?enguth, Qi Feng, Thomas Hardjono , André Vasconcelos, Miguel Pupo Correia for a deep dive into blockchain interoperability: why it is needed, progress that has been made, how it is currently deployed and used, and likely paths of future development.
Recently, NetChoice and the Computer & Communications Industry Association won a significant victory in their lawsuit against the attorneys general of Florida and Texas for passing laws that forbade social media platforms from "censoring" users' online postings. In this story, author Pamela Samuelson examines the case from various aspects and discusses its implications for the future of "private marketplaces of ideas."
NetChoice argued that social media companies have the same constitutional rights as traditional media firms. So if newspapers have constitutional rights to exercise editorial discretion to decide against publishing, for example, a critical letter to the editor, social media firms should have equivalent rights to decide not to host content that, for example, violates its community guidelines.
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