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]."

Comments

I don't receive any spam

[Dancin_Santa]

Hotmail's spam filter has gotten really smart in the past few months. Yahoo's filter used to be the best among web mailers, but Hotmail has improved to the point that I don't get any spam in my hotmail inbox anymore.

I'm not one to go about shouting the praises of Microsoft, but someone over there's got their head out of their asses.

Instead of Text?

[vraddict]

Why not use a photograph of something very destinguishable by a human, IE a picture of a horse, or car, etc. It would be much more difficult to program a bot to detect what is in the picture. Or better yet, use that and the CAPTCHA text located in the corner of the photograph. It doesn't seem like it would be that much more trouble to enter in two pieces of information instead of just the CAPTHCA text.

Re:I've always thought

[andih8u]

I've been using this http://jodrell.net/projects/mailto which puts your mailto link into a coupla hundred character long javascript. People can still click on the mailto link as per norm, but getting the address from the source is a different matter.

Re:how about tons of fake emails on webpages?

[Eustace Tilley]

Take a look at WebPoison

Re:Blind Users

[aridhol]

Braille.