OnStar will soon include the ability for the police to shut off your engine remotely. Buses are getting the same capability, in case terrorists want to re-enact the movie Speed. The Pentagon wants a kill switch installed on airplanes, and is worried about potential enemies installing kill switches on their own equipment.

Microsoft is doing some of the most creative thinking along these lines, with something it’s calling “Digital Manners Policies.” According to its patent application, DMP-enabled devices would accept broadcast “orders” limiting capabilities. Cellphones could be remotely set to vibrate mode in restaurants and concert halls, and be turned off on airplanes and in hospitals. Cameras could be prohibited from taking pictures in locker rooms and museums, and recording equipment could be disabled in theaters. Professors finally could prevent students from texting one another during class.

Somehow I knew Microsoft would be involved in this.  Read on for Bruce’s impressive rant against devices controlling devices.  I’m in 100% agreement with him on this issue.

Libraries might like the idea of being able to silence cellphones entering the building, but there are just too many ways that something like this can be abused.  At least give me the ability to reject these “orders” being sent to my gadgets.  You hear me, Microsoft?

Coding Horror has a post on CAPTCHA effectiveness and how it’s a “necessary evil.” Be sure to read through the comments for some added discussion and insight.

A recent post on Modern Blue suggests a CAPTCHA alternative that uses CSS to stop spammers. The trick is to include an extra field in the form that is hidden from humans using CSS. Spam bots will still see the field and almost always try to enter something into it. Humans, on the other hand, will not see the form field in their browser and will therefore leave it blank. When processing forms, any submissions that have data in the special field can be tossed out as spam. The post’s comments indicate that this method works very well.

Finally, a story posted to Slashdot earlier this week asks the question “Have Spammers Overcome the CAPTCHA?” It seems that spammers are managing to generate tons of new Hotmail accounts. Since Hotmail uses CAPTCHA to block automated creation of accounts, it may be that someone has found a way around it.

Wordpress.com just announced that their accounts can be used as OpenIDs. So I can now use my blog account to automatically authenticate on other OpenID enabled services. Other sites like Digg have announced that they plan to support OpenID in the future.

So it looks like OpenID may be going mainstream. How long until library vendors support this? When the rest of the world is using OpenID on sites like Flickr and MySpace, how many library catalogs will support it for patron login? I’m afraid that I already know the answer.

How much do you want to bet that the first OpenID enabled library system will be an open source product?