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Fallout From the Fall of CAPTCHAs
An anonymous reader recommends Computerworld's look at the rise and fall of CAPTCHAs, and at some of the ways bad guys are leveraging broken CAPTCHAs to ply their evil trade. "CAPTCHA used to be an easy and useful way for Web administrators to authenticate users. Now it's an easy and useful way for malware authors and spammers to do their dirty work. By January 2008, Yahoo Mail's CAPTCHA had been cracked. Gmail was ripped open soon thereafter. Hotmail's top got popped in April. And then things got bad. There are now programs available online (no, we will not tell you where) that automate CAPTCHA attacks. You don't need to have any cracking skills. All you need is a desire to spread spam, make anonymous online attacks against your enemies, propagate malware or, in general, be an online jerk. And it's not just free e-mail sites that can be made to suffer..."
I can't wait until someone's daughter tries to make an account on Barbie's Horse Talk website and is presented with the following CAPTCHA:
Prove that a 3-manifold space has the additional property that each loop in the space can be continuously tightened to a point then it is just a three-dimensional sphere.
I read the internet for the articles.
The first thing to actually pass the Turing test will probably be a spam-bot. Isn't that disgusting?
The irony about this is that a CAPTCHA is a Turing test, a form of authentication designed to prove that a human is making the request. Given that some CAPTCHAs are rapidly becoming too hard for people to read, the outcomes of the tests are reversed - humans cannot win the test, only computers.
I have CAPTCHAs on my blog, but only deny posters who actually fill them in. Goes a long way to deterring spammers.
M
it is no wonder that the "under 25" crowd now says "myspace me" or "facebook me" and no longer use email. why would they?
Whatever happened to giving someone your phone number and actually talking to them. I asked a girl for her number the other night and she gave me her myspace address. Thanks, but no thanks. At least make the effort and give me a fake phone number if you don't ever really want to talk to me again.
I am Jack's complete lack of surprise.
I've toyed with the idea of making users write a 500 word essay on a random topic. I would then send this to my high school English teacher, and if it got maybe a B or above I would consider it legit.
Saying "I'll probably get modded down for this" in a post is the best way to get it modded up.
Howcome /. is so spam free?
You must be new here.
and blind.
If you can read this, I forgot to post anonymously.
what is the third word of this sentence?
No, its the first.