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

Blind Users

[X-rated Ouroboros]

I've often wondered how these types of systems can be made handicapped accessible

Re:I've always thought

[Grimster]

Yes this is a great solution if the only people you want to email you are a little towards the smart side. But speaking as someone who has to deal with "joe sixpack" daily I've seen people who are confused by user@NOSPAMdomain.com and when I tell them to go to http://webmail.domain.com/ to get their webmail they put www. on the front!

These same people if I were verbally giving them the url to slashdot would end up at http://www.slash..org/ (god I wish I were trying to make a joke but seriously I've had this happen).

Because of this my email is plainly visible on our web site, and in my forums, and on a few other forums and on an occasional usenet message. With a combination of RBL's, bayesian filtering, procmail soup and other goodies my spam count per day is kept to a low roar (double figures in spam number rather than four figures, again I wish this were joking).

Re:A better way to do this...

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

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.