Spammers Learn to Outsource Their Captcha Needs

lukeknipe writes "Guardian Unlimited reporter Charles Arthur speaks with a spammer, discussing the possibility that his colleagues may be paying people in developing countries to fill in captchas. In his report, Arthur discusses Nicholas Negroponte's gift of hand-powered laptops to developing nations and the wide array of troubles that could arise as the world's exploitable poor go online." From the article: "I've no doubt it will radically alter the life of many in the developing world for the better. I also expect that once a few have got into the hands of people aching to make a dollar, with time on their hands and an internet connection provided one way or another, we'll see a significant rise in captcha-solved spam. But, as my spammer contact pointed out, it's nothing personal. You have to understand: it's just business."

Comments

I call job theft!

[hclyff]

Damn those developing countries, stealing all the decent jobs from the hard working Americans.

These lead shoes

[future assassin]

are nothing to do with business its just personal. I would be more more then happy to plead guilty if I ever got cought for beating the fuck out of a spammer.

Re:These lead shoes

[SharpFang]

Actually, Russia and China are far second behind USA which holds over 60% of spam market.

A long-time problem

[worb]

I'm not sure if poor people filling in CAPTCHAs should be our biggest concern, when people are in fact dying all over the world from war, starvation, and so on (yes, I know that it's possible to focus on several problems at once). However, the problem with CAPTCHAs being worked around by real people (either by hiring people to do it or by luring porn surfers to fill it in for them) has been there for ages.

If I am not mistaken, there have been several stories on this kind of thing on Slashdot...

Ayway, the bottom line is that spammers have been doing this for a long time, and I'm not sure if the $100 laptops will make a difference either way. Will these $100 laptops all have internet access?

Re:A long-time problem

[FireFury03]

Even if it does happen, though, it will only go to show that captchas aren't the way to get rid of spam, bots etc.

I would certainly like to see the end of captchas, and I have resisted using them on my own sites. They are really bad for accessibility and therefore illegal in many situations and just generally unfair to anyone who can't solve captchas (whether that be by disability or browser choice). However, I have yet to see any other technology able to do the job.

Re:A long-time problem

[ajs318]

I'm sure there are ways of defeating that at the CAPTCHA server level. Generate a brand new image every time, and send it out along with a cookie. The cookie is a database key which refers to the CAPTCHA solution; the record also contains the timestamp when the image was generated and the IP address to which it was sent. (NOT the MD5 of the solution: anyone can generate an MD5 for any word and send that as the cookie contents with their word as the answer, effectively bypassing the image altogether.) The answer must not only be correct; it must also come from the same IP address that received the image, and within a reasonable time limit. IP addresses cannot be forged (or else the server would be speaking to the wrong client) and nor can timestamps (which come from the server anyway), so this ought to be fairly robust. Checking the referrer won't help, because referrers can be forged.

The CAPTCHA image and question themselves need some thought as well. Just having a person type some "distorted" text verbatim is a bit christian IMHO, because it's vulnerable to OCR. Insisting to change the order or capitalisation ("type this backwards in all lower case") would be a good start, but there are plenty more techniques involving pictures that only a human being will be able to use; and you can possibly even set a knowledge barrier (by using challenges that will be easy for people in your chosen field but not random idiots) to keep out undesirables.

Re:A long-time problem

[Don'tTreadOnMe]

Just having a person type some "distorted" text verbatim is a bit christian...

Maybe it's just too early in the morning for me, but what does that mean? That typing distorted text is easy? That it's smart/dumb? That it makes you love your neighbor as you would have them love you?

Re:A long-time problem

[user24]

this is exactly how most session-based CAPTCHAs work. The timestamp idea is unworkable - it doesn't take that long for data to be ferried half way across the world, so if you implement a timeout, you'll end up pissing off your legitmate users as well thwarting spammers, and if you make the timeout longer it'll render it completely ineffective - what I'm saying is that it takes as long for a spammer to type a captcha as it does a legitmate user.

Stuff like "type this backwards in lower case" won't help *in the least* - it'd be trivial to get past, as trivial as writing a bot to collect email addresses, and we know how many of those there are.

Checking the IP address won't work (unfortunately) because certain ISPs (*cough*AOL*cough*) use multiple outgoing IPs for the same user; it's ridiculous but there you have it.

In any case, IP addresses can be forged; the spammer doesn't need to receive a response, he just needs to send his CAPTCHA and spam message; if he's on 4.3.2.1 and needs to send from 1.2.3.4 then he will - the server's "yes you got it" response will be sent to 1.2.3.4 but the spammer doesn't care; his spam has got through.

In short, there is no serverside way of preventing a captcha from being relayed to/from a 'processor' be it OCR or human.

However, what needs to be remembered is that in 95% of cases, any type of captcha will stop 100% of spam. Most captchas out there are pitifully weak in terms of OCR resistance, have implementation bugs coming out of their *ahem* and 'in principle' offer no security whatsoever, but they work because most spammers only after the low hanging fruit.

Re:A long-time problem

[arivanov]

You are were joking, but in fact not that far from the truth.

I did DSL installs in an ex-soviet block backwater which is not even in the EU yet in 1998. At that time UK and the rest of Europe (except Scandinavia) was still wetting themselves over a second ISDN channel and 56K modems. In the same country ethernet to the home in big cities is the norm, not the exemption. The cable operators built bandit networks using twisted pair as far back as 1999-2000. So on, so fourth.

Similarly, I had to design, deploy and build QoS aware networks in 1998. UK and the rest of Europe is just about getting there in the last 2 years. US is not even close (regardless of how much noises does ATT make about net neutrality).

Similarly, VOIP was all over the place by 2000 up to an connecting SMEs and it is just about getting there now in EU.

Similarly...

Do not underestimate the effect of an incumbent monopoly on business and technology. In most 3rd world countries the local incumbent has been bypassed and regulation has been ignored. A few bribes here and there have been sufficient to effectively kill off any attempts by the incumbent to prevent the usage of "unallowed" technologies. As a result the deployment of many technologies is 5-6 years ahead of the "civilised world" where the incumbent can use the regulator and police to strangle any technological progress.

Re:A long-time problem

[secolactico]

Most of the time, I can't while sober. Is that a g or a 9? Does case matters? That kinda look like an S but could be a distortion...

Re:A long-time problem

[bogado]

I use readable captcha, the challenge to the spammer is not only "reading" the text but parsing it. I have a categorized database of words, each word belongs to one or more categories. The system makes a question what word in the list belongs, or not, to a certain category.

Just to make it harder I put it in an image, that has several rotated letters that have a sufficiently different color, this is only a stop gag because all of this can be filtered easily enough, but it can look like a usual captcha to a normal program that tries to solve.

Since it is a blog in Portuguese, this will filter people who don't speak it, but I guess those would not be interested in commenting about something that do not understand. :-)

Re:A long-time problem

[Spacejock]

I thought of a captcha the other day which would be easy for humans and hard for PCs to solve: show three images, tick the one which is smiling or crying or angry or whatever. (Or happiest, saddest) You could mix real photos (greyscale, say) with stick drawings to really stuff up the automated systems.

Only problem is, those with screenreaders would be very much disadvantaged unless you had audio cues to go with the images.

Re:A long-time problem

[FlunkedFlank]

That's basically what http://www.kittenauth.com/ is trying to do.

using porn to solve captchas

[CandyMan]

Cory Doctorow wrote some time ago about an umbeatable way to solve captchas: have a the captcha-circumventing bot connected to a free porn site, inline the images in the gateway pages to the photos and videos, and have the porn-seekers gain access by solving the images. They would have the same infrastructure that they would need if they used developing world click-workers, without the hassle of having to arrange payments.

This tell us two things

[Dark Paladin]

1. The cost of computing and Internet access have truly dropped to a point to where it is nearly "universal".
2. The Human solution sometimes is the best.

What's going to be interesting is threefold: how do we conquer this problem, and how long until "sweat spam shops" have opened up, and how long until the outsourcers become the main branches? Much like the Cory Doctorow story revolving around sweat shops of MMO players, it might not be long until automated scripts are combined with "sweat shop" style workers, who's only job it so enter in the proper "human" data to fill spam.

On the other hand, as outsourcing has taught us, it is only a matter of time before the outsourcees become the suppliers as they get the training they need. Once the "local guy" starts making up the scripts, it's only a matter of time before he/she goes to open up their own spamming sweat shop. Which is a good thing in a weird way as the article points out - it encourages new business at the expense of annoyance.

The next phase of solutions might have to focus on more detailed question/responses - but there's a danger in this in finding the "sweet spot". You want to make it as expensive as possible for spammers, but not so annoying for your "true customers". Much like my new bank's online service, perhaps, where they made me select my "security image" and more personal questions so I had to enter 2-3 things to truly "log in" the first time.

it is just business

[PrinceAshitaka]

I think people should not just be upset with the spammers, but those who buy from spammers. Spammers just fill a market need. If nobody was buying penis pills, you would never be spammed.

Re:it is just business

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem with this reasoning is that there is only a small group of people buying the pills, but the spam is received by a much larger group.

This is of course because spreading spam costs too little to be worried about pre-selecting the audience. When advertising on TV or sending info by post, companies usually try to match their audience to the product they are going to sell. I.e. they do not send adverts for luxury products to houses in poor neighborhoods, they try to weed their lists so that bouncing addresses are not kept on it forever, etc.
All this to maximize the return on the cost of sending the adverts.

Spammers don't have to do this, because they make money anyway.
When it would cost 1 cent to send a spam message, it would not be worthwile to send it to 100000 addresses and make 1 sale of a $25 product.

Re:it is just business

[Anonymous Coward]

Whilest spam is by far the worst case, all direct marketting suffers from this problem to some extent. Very little of the crap that's shoved through my door, SMSed or telemarketted to me is actually relevent to me.

I can assure you that all direct marketing bureaus match the product and target audience. When living in a lower-class neighborhoud, you will find very few Mercedes or Jaguar flyers on your doorstep. It will not be perfect, but nobody is just throwing away money they know they can better spend elsewhere.

(maybe it also differs by country; I can assure in certain countries those bureaus have very detailed profiles they can use to target advertisements)

Re:it is just business

[Eggplant62]

Easier solution: Kill all those with tiny penes. Only the well-endowed should be allowed to live, thus no need for penis pills. QED.

or maybe...

[idlake]

It's pretty depressing when one of the primary worries of bringing the third world on-line is that it will drive the cost of breaking anti-spam measures to zero.

In fact, there is a lot of good, low-end on-line work low-skilled third-world labor can do once they are on-line. That's a good development: it gets work done that otherwise wouldn't get done, and it gets people jobs that beat the back-breaking, dangerous work they'd otherwise have to do (provided they aren't too old, weak or ill to do it in the first place).

Hey, maybe that third world labor can also do the spam classification, manually. I'd be willing to pay for that.

Re:or maybe...

[houghi]

What if the result is an anti-spam sweatshop. Then we would have a REAL moral issue.
1) We boycot them, so the criminals who exploit them don't get any money
2) Keep using them, so the criminals who spam us don't get any money

Dupe/Oldnews

[Threni]

http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/09/06/121 7240

Re:Dupe/Oldnews

[MickDownUnder]

I think this one is a little different, the other article was just a hypothetical, this is actually a real case of spamming occuring with a captcha image.

I also found his quotation from Bill Gates quite interesting...

Oh well. I guess I'll have to sit in the corner with Bill Gates, who declared in January 2004 that "spam will be solved in two years". After you with the pointy-D hat, Bill.

Perhaps Bill was thinking about his trusted/treacherous computing model (posted earlier today on slashdot) when he made this statement.

Anyhow old news is good news. It gives me a chance to plug my CAPTCHA solution, which will take more than just a few seconds for a 3rd world data entry person to get past. I created this component mainly because I'm trying to make a site that adheres to accessibility standards, which of course is an impossibility if you use CAPTCHA images. The other reason I think CAPTCHA images are a bad idea is OCR. If there isn't already an OCR solution available today I think it is inevitable that there'll one day be one that can read any image that a human can read. But I guess this is one more thing to add to the list of reasons as to why CAPTCHA images are stupid - 3rd world data entry teams.

This is simply stupid

[trojjan]

The very point of spam is it is almost zero cost to the spammer. When you pay people to answer to captchas the zero cost factor disappears. I don't think cheap computers and internet will make the problem dangerous
Not everyone in the third world is going to get computers
Every computer is not going to get internet connected
Not everyone on the internet is going to be spamming
Also consider the fact how much can a single person spam. If the dude with the new cheap computer answers captchas for even 15 hours a day they would hardly generate over a 1000 spam messages which is likely to get the spammer one or two hits. Do you think the spammer is stupid enough to pay for this much profit?

I hope the spammer understands...

[The Master Control P]

When someone sets up a fund that pays out to the first person to brutally murder a spammer and hang his head on a lamp post using cat5, it's not personal... it's just business.

Spam will never be stopped as long as the perceived gains > perceived risks. Unless there is a holocaust of stupid people, there will always be people dumb enough to buy from spam, so you're not going to solve this equation by reducing the left side. So raise the right side... Put $10 million into ten Swiss bank accounts. Then get the message out: First ten times a known major spammer is brutally murdered, the first party to provide evidence of their involvement gets the location of a buried bank account key.

I don't usually believe in violence to solve problems, but when you're dealing with people who've demonstrated that there is nothing so depraved they won't do it, and the alternative is governments regulating the 'Net... *shudder*...

Now, speaking seriously (okay, more seriously - hearing that Alan Ralsky got brutally tortured to death on the evening news would KICK ASS), as long as everyone with a brain is absolutely determined to not respond to any spam the problem will never be solved. Why? Because as long as that is true, the S-N ratio at the spammer's inbox will be favorable, because you can never block 100% of spam, and unless you DO, idiots will get it and will click it.

So, e-mail clients should be programmed to automatically respond to EVERY message they get (or at the very least, every message flagged as spam) with an ad-libbed "O rly? tell me more", unless the e-mail came from a known-good mailing list or contact. Result: If even 1% of recipients responded and didn't buy, the signal-to-noise ratio at the bastard's inbox plunges by a factor of a hundred. Everybody responds, and spam-friendly ISPs implode under a digital tsunami of replies. The SOB pumping out 100 million messages can't possibly sort out the 1000 buyers from the 99,999,000 fakes.

And for spammers who use links to their websites: Users submit suspect sites to open database of spammer sites. Sites are voted on; After 100 votes, if the guilty verdict > 90% the site it put in the "to DDOS" list for a client script to retrieve and wget entries from. Certain disreputable hackers, whom the database operators want nothing to do with, unfortunately rent botnets and install this client program on millions of hacked windows boxes. Would that be an immoral action? Yes. Spammers have all the moral restraint of Nazis, and they're winning the spam war - playing nice is no longer an option.

Unfortunately, it won't happen. MS, Google, Yahoo, and Firebird need to incorporate this into all their clients, along with whitelisting utilities, all at once - NGH. Because of the sheep mentality, no one will want to be the first to stand up. In short, like the decay of diamond into graphite, it's *should* happen but has far too high of an energy barrier to actually happen.

Okay, I'm ready - someone ^C^V that stupid checklist.

Re:Now what?

[cyberon22]

Hire someone in the developing world to monitor your blog and clear it of spam. If the cost is insignificant to them it is insignificant to you. And as the cost of labour rises with competition the problem naturally goes away.

Just business?

[Yaztromo]

I'm currently hiring 3rd world citizens to kick spammers in the crotch.

To the spammers: it's nothing personal. You have to understand: it's just business.

Yaz.

Follow the money

[Attaturk]

So, e-mail clients should be programmed to automatically respond to EVERY message they get (or at the very least, every message flagged as spam) with an ad-libbed "O rly? tell me more", unless the e-mail came from a known-good mailing list or contact. Result: If even 1% of recipients responded and didn't buy, the signal-to-noise ratio at the bastard's inbox plunges by a factor of a hundred. Everybody responds, and spam-friendly ISPs implode under a digital tsunami of replies. The SOB pumping out 100 million messages can't possibly sort out the 1000 buyers from the 99,999,000 fakes.

I don't think spammers read the replies - at least they'd be fools if they did. They don't typically expect any useful replies - they're simply acting on behalf of a third party either raising the profile of its brand or promoting some offer. I personally find it more fruitful to go after the organisation being advertised. If someone is touting Viagra, get in touch with the highest marketing authority you can at Pfizer. If someone is selling cheap watches, go to the website where you can buy the watch, go through the process and find out where your money would go and/or who owns the domains etc. Then follow the chain back up to someone who might give a damn and give them a really hard time. If everyone did that it'd be far more effective than replying to the spam mails. :)

Re:Follow the money

[hughk]

Hit the credit card companies. Hit them hard. It seems too easy to get a merchant account for online trading with no valid product to sell. The Rolexes etc are usually sold as fakes anyway. Rolex would love to close them down, same goes for Pfizer and V1agra. Heck I've even complained to a software vendor about pirated software being openly sold. Microsoft replied with a orm letter but I had a more meaningful response from Adobe, but I had directed the complaint via an onsite consultant who took this seriously. The response was along the lines of "You close one down, another springs up".

The real route would be to order something that is being sold as genuine, such as MS Office. Get the fake confirm it is a fake with MS and refuse the CC payment. The CC companies will soon start being more careful if they get a lot of refused transactions. Sure the merchant doesn't get paid, but it costs the CC company lots of time to process the reversal.

Re:Wow! $9 / hr?

[KillerBob]

As a moderately successful finance professional, I make almost $33 per day. That is, 6 days per week, 9 hrs per day and no overtime pay. It rhymes, so it must be good

*blink* what country do you live in? In a 1st world nation, that's *well* below the standard minimum wage. Here in Ontario, for example, minimum wage is $6.85/hour. Even after taxes are taken off, that's about $45/day if you're working full time, and I think there's talk about raising the minimum wage to $7.40. Hell, an untrained private in the Canadian army, who has just come in off the street and has no education after Grade 10, makes almost 3 times what you claim, and he doesn't have to pay for room/board.

This is just stupid

[Vexorian]

Come on!, Remember the usual "Don't teach the poor to read, that would make them a threat"? This all sounds as "don't give the poor any access to the internet, they could become a threat" . And for god's sake it is not like captchas are any difficult for just a program to beat.

I administrate a site with a vBulletin forum, and every once in a while a bot posts messages. Registration requires passing a captcha, in fact, I decided to just remove the captcha, it was seriously not helping stop the spam and was just making the registration harder FOR HUMANS.

BTW: I noticed that Russian bots are more likely to beat captchas.

Re:This is just stupid

[Doctor Crumb]

Usually, if a bot is getting past your captcha, it is circumventing it, not solving it. First, check if you are running with REGISTER_GLOBALS set to "off". Then, make sure your site is only accepting form submissions from the relevant form on your own site; a simple referer check is enough to stop most forum/comment spam. Only if you have secured everything else and you have proof that the bots are actually solving your captcha should you blame the captcha.

I doubt you would, actually

[Moraelin]

Actually, I doubt you would actually beat one. Not meant as an insult, but I believe that you don't have what it takes. If you had, you'd already be either in jail, or a CEO, or chief of marketting or various other positions suited to people able to think "it's just business" when harming others. Or in his place making a good living sending spam and 419 mails.

See most people are quite able to speak/cheer about and for beating others up, killing others, war, etc, as long as it's just talking. They might even actually do it, if a fit of rage disables their sanity for long enough. But fits of rage aren't something you can plan and execute whenever you wish. And otherwise when you actually have to do it, there's this interlock against harming other humans. It's partially "what if it was me in his shoes" education (even if you logically know it would never be in his place spamming) and partially that interlock most animals have against harming their own more than strictly necessary. (Even when cats or dogs fight their own there is always a mechanism to signal "I give up" and the other _will_ cease.)

It's a strange world, really. The same people who could be shaking a fist and screaming for war against X at the top of their lungs, would actually have trouble looking one of X in the eyes and squeezing the trigger. A lot of PTSD cases in war aren't just people getting shocked by being shot at, but shocked by having shot other humans.

There is one cathegory that can cheerfully think "it's only business": the sociopaths. They live in a strange world in which the others are NPCs: the others don't matter, they're not the same, "it could be me in his shoes" doesn't apply, etc. They can lie, cheat, murder, torture, whatever, and be perfectly able to look themselves in the mirror after it. Because the other guy didn't matter.

And, sad to say, if you weren't born one, I doubt you could actually beat this guy up in cold blood. If anyone gave you a baseball bat and this guy tied to a chair, you just couldn't actually do it.

And it's probably better that way. I'm thinking we as a society would do better to just start recognizing sociopaths for what they are, and the damage they can do. This guy, for example, is a sociopath, plain and simple. He's not just "being smart", he's not "just doing business", he's not "just doing what's needed", or the other things these guys like to pose as. He's just someone who doesn't even see you as a human being, much less his equal.

Re:I doubt you would, actually

[guaigean]

The problem with your logic is that sociopaths exist in much higher ratio's than you seem to believe. See, according to http://www.psychiatric-disorders.com/personality/a ntisocial.php and other sources, nearly 3.6% of the US population is sociopaths. Essentially, the only thing keeping 1/30th of the population from this behavior is laws. While sociopaths may not care whether you live or die, they do care whether or not they go to jail. That means 1 in 30 people CAN squeeze that trigger, and not really feel too bad about it. These aren't some rarity, meant to be warded off by the masses. This is a common behavior disorder, and odds are, many people you know have it.

Re:I doubt you would, actually

[Moraelin]

Nothing against all that, and yes, I knew that they're not uncommon. I was going by a roughly 4% number, but 3.6% is close enough. In a nutshell, yes, we can very quickly aggree about all you've wrote.

The point still stands that you can't just snap your fingers and become one, so it's kinda pointless to dream about becoming one. "Man, if I were alone with this guy for a minute, I'd soo punch his clock" is a pipe dream. Either you aren't a sociopath at all, and in practice you couldn't do anything to this guy. Or if you are one and not already in jail, chances are you have better passtimes than beating a spammer up. Also chances are you wouldn't give enough of a damn about the rest of humanity to rid them of a spammer.

And the second point, although I just skirted it in the last paragraph is: we're IMHO better off just recognizing these guys for what they are, than dreaming of becoming one.

Their main weapon and "super-power" is the ability to pass for just a guy like you or me, except they always have a good excuse to be callous and ruthless. "We're the good guys, so it's ok if we break the rules." (At which point we're not the good guys any more.) "You can't make an omelett without breaking a few eggs." (Except they invariably break a lot of eggs and practically never end up with a decent omelett. Because in the end, breaking eggs is just for the fun, and the omelett is just an excuse.) "Everyone else is doing it, so it's ok if we do it too." (At which point we're a part of the problem too.) "You can't get ahead by being one of the sheep." (But at what cost to the society of those "sheep"?) "It may be unpopular/unethical/whatever, but someone has to do it. It's just doing what's necessary." (Really? I've yet to see many situations where being an asshole is _necessary_. An easy way out, maybe, but an absolute necessity for society, almost never.) Etc.

And since they almost never can do all the harm alone, they have to use those a lot. They have to recruit their, well, basically "accomplices", by posing as the guys like you and me, only with the smarts and willpower to do what, sadly, needs to be done. So basically the worst thing you can do to one is to stop believing those lies and excuses.

Dreaming to become one, just gets one closer to _accepting_ that line of reasoning. Once you've accepted that it's ok to act antisocially and illegally if it's for the right reason (e.g., beating this guy up because he's a spammer,) you're one step closer to accepting it for a lot less clear-cut reasons.

Yes, it won't really get you closer to actually becoming one. But it might get you one step closer to accepting it from someone who is one.

That's, more or less, all I'm trying to say.

Re:I doubt you would, actually

[Moraelin]

They love to pose as just the smart ones, yes. They do that a lot.

But in the end that all bears fairly little relevance. Even if there is no afterlife at all (in fact, especially if there isn't one), there are some millenia of learning to, more or less, work together to make our stay here reasonably acceptable. That's in the end all that society is.

If all humans actually were unchecked wolves to other humans, you'd probably find this one existence here to be very shitty and very short. Because at least 1%, the elite among the elites, as psychopathy goes, would be perfectly capable even to slice you up for nothing more than because they're bored and would find it funny to see you scream.

So instead we've worked out a way to live with each other somewhat better. It's not perfect, but it's the best we've managed.

And these people being "smart" invariably comes at the expense of everyone else's happiness. One unchecked prick can cause 1000 or 100,000 people to be happy. Or several million. At the risk of invoking Goodwin's law, Hitler was a diagnosed psychopath. They're the school bully being happy at the expense of a lot of other kids being a lot unhappier.

Even if we accept them "smart" to ruthlessly pursue only their own happiness, it's something that causes more unhappiness on the whole. A society where they're left unchecked isn't particularly happy even for the most of them, as most of them will just find a bigger bully stepping on their toes. And a lot less for the rest of us.

So basically, well, it's still in everyone's interest to keep them in check and stop falling for the various excuses.

Re:I doubt you would, actually

[guaigean]

Well, from that line of thought, I agree. I have to say, that is one of the most well thought out responses I've seen on /., and thanks for further explaining. You're right, in that throughout history we have shown that the sociopathic can be contained, but only when they cross a certain line that enough people find unacceptable, and I think the most important thing, as you pointed out, is that sociopaths can only operate when there is a certain amount of apathy from the masses.

So you've just described a proxy

[Moraelin]

So basically with all that IP checking and all, you've just said (in so many words) that the spammer must use a proxy.

Basically if machine A is the server, machine B is doing the spamming, and the paid peon cracking captchas for a living is on machine C, then it can jolly well go on like this:

- the peon's machine C connects to one of the many machines B doing the spamming (it can also be the other way around: machine B could initiate a connection and wait for the human to be ready. Works great if machine B is behind a firewall too, since outgoing connections typically get through just fine.)

- machine B connects to the server A, gets the image, the cookie and everything

- machine B relays this to machine C

- the peon does the captcha on his machine C, in the chinese sweatshop where he works

- machine C relays this answer back to machine B

- machine B now gives it to your server, together with the cookie and all. It comes with the right cookie, from the right IP, etc. So _how_ is your server going to know about all the proxying behind it?

- machine B now proceeds to spam with impunity, since most servers don't ask for a captcha for each and every single message sent

It's not even a new idea. Exactly this kind of relaying, in various forms (including this, and using unknowing visitors to a porn site to crack proxied captchas thinking they're logging in to the porn site, etc) has been discussed ever since the first lemming thought that captchas are _the_ ultimate, unbreakable solution.

Except every time it prompted a barrage of weird "well, it hasn't happened yet, so it's not possible" and similar, and the lemmings went back to pretending that proxying doesn't exist, and machine recognition is obviously the only way to crack a captcha. In fact, back to solving the wrong problem.

Well now it's happening exactly as predicted. In a way I feel vindicated, even though it's sad that something harmful has to happen for people to finally pry their heads out of their asses and acknowledge reality.