Slashdot Mirror
Turing Tests to Stop Spam
cexy writes "The Register has a story about how Hotmail and Yahoo! are using Carnegie Mellon developed captcha technology (completely automated public Turing tests to tell computers and humans apart) to stop spammers from automating signups for accounts from which they can send spam. These guys are using captcha too, but to stop incoming spam."
For those who dont know, The CMU developed captcha project is great. Check out their work here:
http://www.captcha.net/
I've only had my Yahoo account since last year and my Hotmail account since 1997, so this may not be a fair comparison:
Yahoo spam today:
0
Hotmail spam today:
18
Which is doing a better job at stopping spam you say?
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
I've run the "Hotmail Test" several times and every time, I get spam within 4-5 days of opening the account. Even if I never ever send an email, the amount of spam grows approximately linearly with time... it only takes about 2 months to exhaust your 2MB quota daily....
At least that was the case the last time I ran this little experiment...
It's no secret, at least it shouldn't be, that Micro$oft is making money selling your hotmail address (yet then they spam you with advertisements for their spam-blocking software)...
*sigh*
I have SpamAssassin at my isp (Verio) and it kicks ass. Probably a false positive per week (and that's often a slashdot Daily Stories email), and a false negative every 3-4 days. Pretty damn good. Cut inbox crapola from 10-20 per day to, well, zero.
sulli
RTFJ.
RTFA. The very first thing the article says is: "Spam fighters have come up with an idea to frustrate the automatic creation of email accounts often used to send spam."
It's to help stop spambots from being able to create email accounts to send spam from, not to filter spam on the client side.
Now if they could just come up with a turing test for slashdot
2 /1 2/30/1740211&mode=thread&tid=111
repeats!
http://developers.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=0
Granted this is not a direct repeat but the articles are just different sources for the same story.
-- The morphemes of your disquisition are ascertainable, but they have eschewed an ambit of transpicuous exposition.
Even if I never ever send an email, the amount of spam grows approximately linearly with time... it only takes about 2 months to exhaust your 2MB quota daily....
You must have some bad luck. I've got a hotmail account I've used consistently for two years, and I'm typically around ~10% of my quota.
Either you're advertising your email address, or you've got some really easy to guess address, because the behavior you describe is far from typical.
Mooniacs for iOS and Android
have you tried to add '@spammailer.com' to the mail blocker? And things still get through?
I turned on my hotmail filters so now only people on my whitelist can send mail directly to my inbox.
0 spam for months now.
The only negative is if someone not on my whitelist sends mail, I have to rummage throught the rest of the junk to find it.
"No Matter Where You Go.. There You Are." -- Buckaroo Banzai
click mail options:
go to
"Enter email address (or domain) to block:"
enter domain in text baox, such as
whatever.com
click, add block
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
When you sign up, if I remember correctly, hotmail used to have an ENABLED option to share your email address... you had to go into options and disable it. Also, make sure you're not signed up for any newsletters or other crap. I've created multiple hotmail accounts, and never get spammed until I use that address somewhere.
-Berj
Just change your preferences to deny messages from anyone who is not in your address book. Problem solved.
Every time you want to send an e-mail to someone, their ISP (or even their own mail server) quickly replies to you with a challenge (image for you to decipher), when you decipher the image, and reply ("as in confirm you're a human") your original message appears in the in-box of the person to whom you've sent it. Anyone can define their own tests if they're not happy with default ones, and you never see an e-mail which hasn't passed YOUR tests.
And since these tests are interactive (ie: you're asking the PERSON who e-mailed you a question, they can be quite hard to fool with a computer).
Non-challenging e-mail addresses (or mailings) can still exist, and will be clearly marked as haven't bee 'verified'... ie: streated as bulk e-mail.
"If anything can go wrong, it will." - Murphy
Well, it's not, but you know...
Mozilla now comes with it's own Spam Filter starting with 1.3Alpha. Anyone know how well it works? I haven't had a chance to try it.
Think this is off topic? Read the last line of the slashdot story and click the link, where you can take a "Free 30-Day Trial!!"
=)
Mail.app's filtering is fantastic. I only look at around one spam message every two weeks, and I've only had one false positive (which was adveritising something, as it was) in the year and a half that I've been using it. The filter is probably too CPU intensive to use on any large scale, though.
well, probably because the spammers already found a way to get by that. Spam nowadays come in different packages. Different subject lines everytime, different email addresses everytime (some are illegal like penis@enlarge.it, I have even seen some from another user who had no idea a spam was sent through their account. Two things also to consider: the amount of CPU power needed to do content filters, and service objective. Like you said, filtering through email address. What about those that use illegal + dynamic addresses? Content, the content is roughly the same. But account for the number of people using hotmail, and account for # of emails per user, and account for the power needed to read through all messages doing an greedy search for matching keywords and phrases. As for service objective, Hotmail is a email provider, and they can't really afford to be wrong in their filtering. Some people use hotmail for professional reasons, and hotmail can't afford to miss
Will I retire or break 10K?
4. SpamBot picks it up off a web site
Centralization breaks the internet.
Turing test is a bit of an exaggeration. They have you look at some garbled text and type what you see. And it's been going on for a very long time.
The Register article had absolutely nothing of value to add. As you were.
Donate background CPU time to fight cancer.
Some people have already produced excellent results in breaking visual CAPTCHAs.
They know that. The blind people can call a phone number and assert that they are blind. An ALT tag that explains the purpose of the picture and mentions the phone number will be enough.
Yes.
Case #1: Spam Arrest will allow internally generated email (like the verifications) through, so there is no loop between two spam arrest users.
Case #2: You can, at anytime, check the messages waiting to be verified, so if you are expecting an email for a order confirmation or whatever, you can see it on the spam arrest website, and either respond/read it there, or authorize them as a sender & add them to your whitelist from then on out.