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Baffling the Spam Bots
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]."
Are you sure they wouldn't end up at http;\\www.\..org/?
50 bucks says all the AC replies to this parent are from the same IP.
"It is not how things are in the world that is mystical, but that it exists." -Ludwig Wittgenstein
It doesn't even fucking matter if that cocksucking Captcha shit is dynamically generated. Rather than batching up the goddamn images, batch your motherfucking account creation requests. When a would-be wanker visits your lame-ass pr0n site, your server begins motherfucking trying to create a Yahoo account (or what the hell ever), and feeds the dynamically-generated Captcha image shit to the human processing bitch. Perhaps it will fucking slow down your cocksucking rate, but that's just a matter of advertising your pr0n site better... by motherfucking spam or google bombing from your cocksucking Yahoo accounts, perhaps.
I have a better idea : present a complex differential equation and ask the person to solve it in less than 10s. If he fails, he's human.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
It's part of the three pronged attack on spam.
1) Obfuscate e-mail addresses
2) Stop spammers from getting to places containing real email addresses
3) Keep stupid people off the internet so the revenue stream of spammers is cut off.
It's you. ODVIGUSE is the word.
A couple of simple math/logic problems such as these should be suitable:
- Find the two roots of x*x-16x+60=0
- What are two numbers who have the sum of 16 and the product of 60?
- From the following facts, what can you infer about Albert?
- All men are mortal.
- Albert is a man
Simple puzzles like this should be able to be figured out by almost all people in a few seconds, and can be expressed in plain text, making them accessible to the blind.<img src="it_says_kitten.jpg">
heh dumb bot
bite my glorious golden ass.
It says:
NVIRGIE
OBVIOUSE
HURCHES
I'm not sure what the hell that means, but if they're expecting someone to come up with other words in place of those then they're really expecting too much. Anything this complicated isn't worth it.
What's in the picture?
> BOAT
Sorry, I don't know the word "BOAT".
> SHIP
Sorry, I don't understand what you are trying to say
> YACHT
Sorry, I don't know that word. Please try again.
> HELP
Help is not available.
> XYZZY
Hello, Dr Falkner!
Well, second one might be ODVIOUSE or even ODVLOUSE, but I don't think the second letter is B.
Future Wiki -- If you don't think about the future, you cannot have one.
Just do a Burrows-Wheeler transform on your e-mail address. Comes with the bonus of preventing stupid people from trying to contact you.
"3) Keep stupid people off the internet so the revenue stream of spammers is cut off."
Nobody will get much of a revenue stream from the few hundred left.
I thought at first it was "CDVIOUSE". The first letter looks a lot like a C, especially with that big chunk cut out of it's right. The second looks like a D to me, because all the top of the B is cut off. Are you sure it's supposed to be "OBVIOUS"?