Are you even a human? This is the existential question we all get asked on a daily basis from the likes of Google, Instagram, TikTok and other tech companies that frankly are in no position to question our humanity.

That's right, today's topic is CAPTCHA. Will you be able to decipher the words we say as they are scrambled into a wavy multicoloured mess? Perhaps you can identify which central American country CAPTCHA is being used in to fight crime? Or will you just download tons of pornography and rage against the machine?

All these questions and more will be given a great big green check mark on this week's episode of Seemingly Unrelated!

Footnotes:

Burgess, Matt. ‘Captcha Is Dying. This Is How It’s Being Reinvented for the AI Age’. Wired. Accessed 28 October 2024. https://www.wired.com/story/captcha-automation-broken-history-fix/.

Gault, Matthew. ‘Captcha Is Asking Users to Identify Objects That Don’t Exist’. VICE (blog), 24 May 2023. https://www.vice.com/en/article/captcha-is-asking-users-to-identify-objects-that-dont-exist/.

Gugliotta, Guy. ‘Deciphering Old Texts, One Woozy, Curvy Word at a Time’. The New York Times, 28 March 2011, sec. Science. https://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/29/science/29recaptcha.html.

Ovide, Shira. ‘Tired of Proving You’re Not a Robot? Say Goodbye to Captcha Boxes.’ Washington Post, 25 July 2023. https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/07/25/captchas-hate-privacy-pass/.

‘The Future of CAPTCHAs’. Accessed 28 October 2024. https://anti-captcha.com/apidoc/articles/the-future-of-captchas.

Krzyworzeka, Natalia, Lidia Ogiela, and Marek R Ogiela. “Cognitive CAPTCHA Password Reminder.” Sensors (Basel, Switzerland) 23, no. 6 (2023): 3170-.

Kumar, Mohinder, M. K. Jindal, and Munish Kumar. “An Efficient Technique for Breaking of Coloured Hindi CAPTCHA.” Soft computing (Berlin, Germany) 27, no. 16 (2023): 11661–11686.

Metz, Rachel. AI Startup Says It Has Defeated Captchas. Technology Review (1998). Vol. 117. Cambridge: Technology Review, Inc, 2014.

“Humans + Porn = Solved Captcha.” Network security 2007, no. 11 (2007): 2–2.

https://gizmodo.com/gpt4-open-ai-chatbot-task-rabbit-chatgpt-1850227471

Alnfiai, Mrim, and Fawaz Alassery. “TapCAPTCHA: Non-Visual CAPTCHA on Touchscreens for Visually Impaired People.” Journal on Multimodal User Interfaces 16, no. 4 (2022): 385–398.

Shi, Chenghui, Xiaogang Xu, Shouling Ji, Kai Bu, Jianhai Chen, Raheem Beyah, and Ting Wang. “Adversarial CAPTCHAs.” IEEE transactions on cybernetics 52, no. 7 (2022): 1–14.

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Welcome to the very first episode of Seemingly Unrelated!

This is the podcast all about the mundane, everyday things we don't think too much about but which have connections to huge events, moments, ideas, etc.

We are your hosts, Dr. Andrew Johnstone and Jason Heat. One is a lecturer and academic with decades of experience in cultural heritage and the other is an actor, writer, and wrestling commentator. We like to keep the theme of seemingly unrelated consistent.

This first episode centers around pre-paid electricity meters/metres. If you've lived in some low quality rental accommodations, you might well know about these disastrous things but if not it's fine everything will make sense soon enough. While they have been bugging renters for decades, there is a sinister, seemingly unrelated connection to rent strikes in Apartheid South Africa.

How will these things be connected? Listen to find out on the first episode of Seemingly Unrelated!

Footnotes:

Brederode, William. ‘Prepaid Electricity Crisis: There Might Be More than 70 Million Meters That Stop Working next Year’. News24.

https://bit.ly/4foynei

Citizens Advice. ‘Almost Half a Million Could Be Forced onto Pricey Pay-as-You-Go Meters by the End of the Year, Warns Citizens Advice’, 30 September 2022. https://bit.ly/3YF5Kng

Ding, et al. ‘Prepayment Meters Strongly Associated with Economic and Health Deprivation: An Observational, Cross-Sectional Study’. medRxiv, 10 January 2023.

‘ESKOM ENCOURAGES INDIGENT HOUSEHOLDS TO CLAIM FREE BASIC ELECTRICITY - Eskom’, 29 September 2021. https://www.eskom.co.za/eskom-encourages-indigent-households-to-claim-free-basic-electricity/.

‘Free Basic Electricity / Alternative Energy: Oversight; Electrical Power Interruptions: Solutions and Strategies | PMG’. https://pmg.org.za/committee-meeting/14159/.

Jacome, Veronica, and Isha Ray. ‘The Prepaid Electric Meter: Rights, Relationships and Reification in Unguja, Tanzania’. World Development 105 (1 May 2018): 262–72.

Kambule, et al. ‘Formulating Best Practice Recommendations for Prepaid Electricity Meter Deployment in Soweto, South Africa – Capitalising on the Developed-World’s Experiences’. Journal of Public Affairs 22, no. 4 (2022): e2646.

Kambule, et al. ‘Exploring the Driving Factors of Prepaid Electricity Meter Rejection in the Largest Township of South Africa’. Energy Policy 124 (1 January 2019): 199–205.

Malama, et al. ‘The Effects of the Introduction of Prepayment Meters on the Energy Usage Behaviour of Different Housing Consumer Groups in Kitwe, Zambia’. AIMS Energy 2, no. 3 (2014): 237–59.

Media, P. A. ‘Extra Costs for Customers on Prepayment Meters to Be Scrapped in Budget’. The Guardian, 11 March 2023, sec. Money.

https://bit.ly/4hyVeWm

‘Prepayment Electricity Metres’. Nature 139, no. 3530 (1 June 1937): 1101–2.

Schnitzler, Antina von. ‘Citizenship Prepaid: Water, Calculability, and Techno-Politics in South Africa’. Journal of Southern African Studies 34, no. 4 (2008): 899–917.

Democracy’s Infrastructure: Techno-Politics and Protest after Apartheid. Princeton University Press, 2016.

Sky News. ‘Why the Problem of Prepayment Meters Won’t Go Away for Vulnerable Energy Customers’.

‘South Africa : Soweto Prepaid Electricity Metering Concerns to Be Heard by Public Enterprises and Cogta Portfolio Committees - ProQuest’. .

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.