The original Turing test

collision detection: The "original" Turing Test: My latest piece in Wired : few know that this is not the only scenario Alan Turing proposed in his famous 1950 paper "Computing Machinery and Intelligence." In it, he suggested an "imitation game," which plays like 20 Questions for transsexuals: first a man and then a computer pose as female, and the interrogator tries to distinguish them from a real woman.

Plazes...not firewall aware

In April Lisa and I met up with some family friends in Paris. They mentioned that they travel a lot and it'd be nice if they could know when people they know are in the area with area being vaguely defined as the same metropolitan area. So, instead of building something myself, I've been keeping an eye out for such things. I have the little bug in the corner that shows where I am, but I have to update it semi-manually (I can update it by email, or a command line on the web host). Anyway, I got pointed to plazes.beta.

I created an account and...the first glitch is that you have to download some code. I download the "Plazes launcher", which apparently tries to determine your network location and send that to the Plazes site.

It failed. Apparently it does not work from inside a firewalled or NAT'd network.

Now, the thing is, it's not that hard to find out what my external IP address is. All you need is a central server (www.example.com) and an agent to connect to it. The central server should get the IP address of the agent, granted it may be the address of the firewall being connected through. The Plazes agent appears to interrogate the router to try to determine its IP address (this would be useless in my case since the home network is double firewalled; a NAT router behind a NAT xDSL modem). It pops up an error dialog asking for details about the router. Not a very scalable solution in my minor league opinion.