Before we start the show we have a little word of warning. This is for you

those of you that use the internet. Specifically bitly that's the site that you

use to shorten URLs. Yeah basically it takes a long link turns it into a smaller kind of random

jumble of letters

our colleague avi at nprand d c maintain some Twitter feeds there and he was about to send out a bitly link to a news

story when he noticed something strange. The word that it generated sort of

jumped out at me. What and what did it say? The F word. And I thought maybe even algorithms have a bad day.

Yeah. And they curse. Well, so what exactly does it say?

Like, what's the bitly link there?

So the first part, which is true to all the shorteners, because we're NPR, it shortens it to n dot PR a

forward slash the number one

the letter you and then there's

there it is that's fantastic

so normally you just you just hit tweet and and but I for some reason this sort of jumped out at me and I decided not to do that.

But think about that, Avi, what a great story. Not everyone's going to recognize that that's like a shortened bitly link, they may think that that's just a story

from NPR.

Yeah, I was thinking about other instances where, you know, humans and machines interact and, you know, there's the

the capture system which is where you have to you go to website and you

before you can register you have to type in numbers that are displayed to

you to prove that you're human.

Yeah.

And I was thinking, well, who is proving what to whom in this case?

...