Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Webmasters Pounce On Wiki Sandboxes

Posted by simoniker on from the fold-spindle-mutilate dept.

Yacoubean writes "Wiki sandboxes are normally used to learn the syntax of wiki posts. But webmasters may soon deluge these handy tools with links back to their site, not to get clicks, but to increase Google page rank. One such webmaster recently demonstrated this successfully. Isn't it time for Google finally to put some work into refining their results to exclude tricks like this? I know all the bloggers and wiki maintainers would sure appreciate it."

1 of 324 comments (clear)

  1. Re:visual security code for sign-up by stevey · · Score: 5, Insightful

    There was a story about defeating this system on /. a while back.

    Rather than using OCR or anything poeople would merely harvest a load of images from a signup site - possible when there are only a given number of finite images, or when there is a consistent naming policy.

    Then once the images were collected they would merely setup an online porn site, asking people to join for free proving they were human by decoding the very images they had downloaded.

    Human lust for porn meant that they could decode a large number of these images in a very short space of time, then return and mount a dictionary attack...

    Quite clever really, sidestepping all the tricky obfuscation/OCR problems by tricking humans into doing their work for them ..