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Baffling the Spam Bots

Posted by michael on from the change-addresses-every-six-weeks dept.

dumpster_dave writes "Scientific American is running an article, Baffling the Bots on techniques to outsmart and subvert spam bots and their chat-room cousins via CAPTCHA. You have probable seen this in the form of images containing text as gate-keepers to various on-line services. The latest evolution is using non-words and distorting the text such that even the best AI systems cannot decipher them, yet humans can not help but do so [cf., Gestalt Psychology]."

1 of 350 comments (clear)

  1. What if everyone responds to the spam? by outanowhere · · Score: 0, Flamebait

    What if everyone who received a spam clicked on the url for the product's page to check out the product, maybe checking it out twice or so?

    Wouldn't that get expensive for the spam hosting site and their mark--I mean, "customer"?

    Especially if everyone just looked without buying?

    Might cost someone so much money that the business would be bankrupt rather quickly.

    Or it might make an upstream provider so annoyed at the traffic to the spam site that they might pull the plug on the scammer--I mean, "spammer".

    Well, perhaps we should just buy their stuff, instead of going to just look... After all, it is the right thing to do, no?