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Your claims are pretty slanderous, and you don't have much to back them up.

For one, it looks like Yahoo did not even implement their own system. If you look right below the word prompt, you can see they're basically using Captcha developed at Carnegie Mellon.

Are you saying CMU stole for you as well?

Is it possible that others came up with similar, if not better, systems, and they used them instead?

However, I hardly think that the way one registers with web sites has *any* bearing on replacing SMTP with a system that hinders spamming and spoofing.

The problem is that web site registrations are automated. It's really easy for me to block spam from automated senders. I just set up a capatcha for first time senders, and put people with whom I have ongoing correspondence into an allow list. Mailing lists could be set up the same way, or even better mailing lists could be done by only pushing the notification of the new message, and then downloading the actual content from a well-known server (either in advance or at the time you read it).

Any more than not giving your phone number to your doctor will stop double-glazing salespeople calling.

It's much easier to regulate the phone system, because phone calls are by their very nature non-anonymous. Giving a central authority access to the identity of every single caller and call receiver would enable laws to be useful, but who wants that?

This system could work. If someone just sent the people at google one very simple link.

Hell, the same thing goes for Slashdot.

It's not that hard to make it really expensive to forge votes. For instance, check out the captcha project at CMU. (Basically, it generates images that are difficult for a computer to recognize, but easy for a human, and challenges the user to respond to them in some way to prove that they are human.) If they could find the right balance of convenience for humans and difficulty for perl scripts, I think they'd have a great thing going. I have always wanted this feature in a search engine ... I'm glad to see it happen.

Given the lengths to which a very few people will go to ruin something for everyone else, I'm not surprised several free services aren't fighting to keep their non-paying customers.

cvs.slashcode.com is down right now; i'll assume your link worked. that said, you're totally right. nearly half of slash is designed to contain the damage from .01% of its' users. the worst part is, the "damage containment" is anything but; instead of elminating bot posts they've implemented measures to gag/censor dissent. while the current system easily gags anonymous posters who post unpopular stuff, it has no effect on anyone spamming a user journal or any other sid where moderators aren't. it's extremely feasible to truly implement anonymous coward, logging no IP's, while at the same totally blocking automated posting. slashdot would seem to be the perfect fit for this.

however, given the fact that /. must also function as a business, and your point that catering to this low-demand zero-profit task would take oodles of development time, it may not be such a good idea.

in the end, the market adjusts everyone.