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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."
my Spam filter in Yahoo catches way, way, more than the one at hotmail. It is always surprising to me when you open a new hotmail account that it takes only like a week to be flooded with Spam. A week of doing nothing with the account but initially opening it. *sigh*
that is why. all the spammers are targetting hotmail. I hate the anti-ms bias. I use a filter on my hotmail. It is an allow only filter. Those are the best kind because I make the decision of who gets through to me.
I recently had to create an e-mail address that I could use for posting to a mailing list where the addresses are all public. I tried Hotmail first, and although I passed part 1 of their Turing test, the captcha test, I think I failed part 2: once I was all done filling in my personal information (retired female homemaker in Antarctica, born in 1891), I got some kind of mystifying error message saying something about my .NET account (which I don't have). I guess if I was human, I'd have been able to figure out what they meant.
Oh well, I passed Yahoo's captcha test, and they didn't have a part 2...
As a recipient of spam, I also don't see this having any benificial effects. I gets lots and lots of spam from hotmail.com and yahoo.com addresses. They're all forged headers, so it doesn't matter that Yahoo and Hotmail have botproofing -- the accounts I'm getting spam from aren't even real Yahoo and Hotmail accounts. It's great that they're trying to make sure they aren't spam havens (and of course it costs them money if spammers use their services), but I really think the whole e-mail infrastructure needs reworking in order to get rid of spam. Sending e-mail should cost some token amount of money, and there should also be some way of tossing out mail with forged headers (e.g., my mail client should be able to tell whether the cryptographic signature on an e-mail indicates that it really came from hotmail.com or yahoo.com).
Find free books.
Yes, it's possible, and has been done recently by some guys in CS at Berkeley. Breaking captchas had always been posed as an open challenge to the AI/image processing community.
NY Times article
Berkeley press release
Computer vision pages (w/papers)
Greg's page on breaking Gimpy
It works with Outlook (not Outlook Express).
The coolest part is when you find an email that is spam, which it didn't catch (perhaps about 5% of the time), just click "Block" and it'll record that you blocked it on their servers, so anyone else receiving the same (or nearly similar, I think) email will have it blocked as well.
In other words, it's a community-driven spam blocker which works better the more people use it. And it already works very well.
I feel fantastic, and I'm still alive.
This idea means licensing them so that they are properly registered, Meaning we know who they are and where they live.
Meaning that they can be billed for use of service, etc. and jail those not properly licensed.
Meaning that we can send bill collectors and tax collectors hunting after them.
The bottom line is that IF we can make it profitable to go after these guys, someone will make a business of it. We just go to figure a way how.
Then we get to use the scum of society, such as bill collectors and tax collectors, and turn them to some good, going after spammers.
And we can use the money collected to subsidise the cost of something useful.
Now Lessig has also proposed something similar to this:
http://www.cioinsight.com/article2/0,3959,533225,0 0.asp
Which essentially means that there are more eyeballs to track the scum down. And a financial reward to do so.
The twist in my proposal is to mach spam have a cost even if sent "legally" - [lots of states have finance problems], and make the penalties truly painful if done illegally. I want to set my own fees for receiving spam
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
The graphics basically don't work with OCR.
I wrote Yahoo about this problem just about a year ago, after
finding no explanation in their online help on about how
visually impaired users were supposed to use their service,
and this is what they had to say.
I kind of thought this sucked, that apparently the solution
is to wait for a human operator to read the feedback
form and phone you back. Surely someone can come up with
a better system.
=-=-=-=
Hello,
Thank you for writing to Yahoo! Account Services.
If you are a visually impaired or blind user, please fill out the
feedback form at:
http://add.yahoo.com/fast/help/us/edit/cgi_access
A customer care representative will call you back, to assist you with
registering for a Yahoo! account.
If we can be of further assistance, please let us know.
Thank you again for contacting Yahoo! Customer Care.
Regards,
Yahoo! Customer Care
For assistance with all Yahoo! services, please visit:
http://help.yahoo.com/