If you were really having to contend with bugs in IE 6.0 and 7.0 you would know this article is a total bs. I find it +5 interesting that a comment based on ignorance about an article based on ignorance gets modded +5 interesting.
Yes. I think Microsoft has actually done a pretty good job on IE 7.0 and the Slashdot editors must be thinking to themselves... what's going on we haven't posted a critical article on IE in about 3 months, somethings wrong!! Oh wait here's an article... looks like FUD, but oh well, it's all we got, *post away*.
I've found IE 7.0 has actually helped me make my site more cross browser compliant. Before IE 7.0 my site did have some css issues causing some minor rendering problems in Safari on a MAC, it seemed to render fine in every other browser. Seeing as I don't own a MAC fixes were a little hard to test. Since the problem was minor and my site is a.NET development site I decided fixing this problem wasn't a high priority for me.
When IE 7.0 came out I found I actually had problems similiar to what I was seeing in Safari. Played around 20mins later site was functioning perfectly in IE 7.0 and surprise surprise it was also looking good in Safari on a MAC. It also turned out to help me find a problem I hadn't previously been aware of with Opera style zooming.
I was using Firefox for all my surfing, of late I've actually found myself using IE 7.0, and I think Firefox is an awesome product, so IE 7.0 really can't be that bad. I only have positive things to say over the differences between IE 7.0 and 6.0.
I read this head line and I thought this building has to be in Dubai and sure enough...
I've spent quite a lot of time there in the past couple of years. This project doesn't really surprise me at all.
It fits right in along side their project to build a business park filled with water that has more canals than Venice and Amsterdam put together, which coincidentally will contain the tallest building in the world the burj tower until they build the next tower to eclipse it that will be one kilometer tall. It also fits right along side a single hotel complex in the middle of the desert with 25,000 hotel rooms, more than all of Los Vegas put together, or their in-door ski park, or their three palm projects and the world artificial island projects and the list goes on and on...
I guarentee you that this building will not rotate entirely (or probably at all) off energy collected in solar cells. The energy required to rotate a skyscraper would be enourmous, I would think you'd be lucky to rotate a building once a decade off the energy collected through solar cells mounted on it.
It's just a gimmick.
In the UAE there are two main industries, property development and oil (in that order). This is just a gimmick to try and draw attention and investor dollars, there are so many mind bogglingly crazy projects in Dubai it really takes quite an effort to come up with something that stands out. By Dubai standards this is quite a moderate effort.
I wouldn't have a problem with this game if I thought it's makers were joking, but reading the interview, I don't think they are; I actually think these guys are serious. They truely believe their own lives are worth more than that of muslims.
This game is the equivalent of making a game about the jewish holocaust where you are a nazi and are rounding up jews to go to Auschwitz.
Jail isn't necessary for these people, nor killing them. What you can do though is let it be known that their behaviour is repugnant and socially unacceptable, rather than your current stance which tacitly gives these guys the nod to continue on down the path they're heading.
Alternatively, why don't you just spell it out and admit that secretly you actually find security in this fascist neo-conservative christian agenda? That if it came to pass that these guys had their way and the one in three people on this planet that are muslim were put to death that you wouldn't have a problem with it; because you're ignorant, you don't understand their culture, religion or customs and because of that you find them threatening.
In either case grow some balls for god-sake.
My girlfriend had a suggestion for altering this game that I think would make it OK. Just simply allow people to choose what religion is on the side of good, so you could then pick muslim as the true religion of god and have all the christians on the side of the anti-christ, that might even be closer to the truth.
Yes, some countries in Europe do imprison you for denying the holocaust; however the people in those same countries live in societies that are on the whole the most tolerant in the world.
And why do you think this is?
Because the one thing these countries have complete intolerance for are people with views that are intolerant of others of a different race or religion.
You see they've already tried the whole toleration of intolerance thing, it didn't work out too well with the Nazis and they're just not going there again.
So... are you going to wait for these neo-conservation Christian fruit cakes to actually start running round rounding up non-Christians into death camps before you stop riding that convenient little fence you're perched on?
And how you going to react to their next game title?
"NIGGER LYNCHING"
A game like the sims where you form your own white supremicist group and then go out finding niggers in small vunerable groups to bail into cars so you can take them out to a farm, beat the crap out of them and then lynch them, then dump their body somewhere. The aim of the game is to kill as many niggers as you can without being caught by evil FBI agents.
Well you're free to express your opionion, and I'm free to boycott these idiots, and encourage others to boycott them.
I think it's far more reprehensible that small minded people insist on imposing ther view of what is right and wrong on other people
It's ironic in the extreme that you make this comment defending a game that is so incredibly intollerant to non-christian beliefs. A game that depicts all muslims as evil and deserving death. How tolerant do you think we should be of such extreme intollerance?
Do you think people should have the freedom to religious expression without persecution ?
At what stage does one person's expression of their freedom become an abuse of anothers?
Do you have the freedom to walk down the street killing people? No of course you don't.
The fact is freedom is a privilege not a right, and when you abuse it in a decent society it is taken away from you e.g. when you kill someone you go to jail. These guys are treading a very thin line, encouraging people to adopt a neo-consertive christian view that is encourages violence or the acceptance of violence acts against non-christians.
Should we wait till neo-conservative fascists like these guys begin to round people up into death camps?
So you haven't received any complaints about this game?
Well here's one. I find this totally offensive. For a company with such a high profile to be peddling crap like this and feeding the fires of racial and religious intolerance is totally unacceptable and completely reprehensible.
You have to be out of your minds to think this is a good way to make money. You can be sure you're never going to see a single dollar from my wallet not for this product or any other that you might choose to sell from here on. I'm sure there's thousands more reading this article and your response to it that are reacting the same way.
Perhaps you can buy the rights to sell dvds of the OJ interview "if i did it" and package it with this game as the ultimate bad taste christmas gift set.
No the real problem is all his creationalist whaco stuff got relisted.
Sometimes censorship can be a good thing, it can save people from making complete idiots of themselves on line.
Now I'm going back to work on my web site....
http://www.theearthisflat.org/
I think everything Microsoft has done has been completely ethical within the context of the global corporate system.
Breaking agreements, or acting upon an agreement that is inconsistent with the original spirit of the agreement is part and parcel of modern business practices. It's purely about the bottom line. If a corporate believes there is an advantage out of acting in a manner inconsistent with an agreement, than it will cost them in terms of possible law suits and litigation, then of course they are going to do the "unethical thing" and make a stack of money out of it.
This sort of stuff goes on all the time, as I write this I'm sure some company out there has just done something to shaft another for it's own advantage.
I really don't care about one company shafting another. I save my outrage over these sorts of practices for cases where a corporate is acting like this with the full knowledge that the harm that is inflicted is not just on some other corporate, but on real people. By this I don't mean financial harm but real bodily harm or death. E.g. Like companies that market products that they know may be harmful, or companies that corrupt political systems bringing civil disorder, starvation and/or war for corporate profit.
We all know this sort of stuff actually goes on. Microsoft hasn't been guilty of anything like this, so why focus your wrath on them?
In terms of Bill's ethics, I think in some ways especially in recent years he has acted far more ethically than most of his peers. His charity work is truely outstanding.
Before anyone goes on about how much Microsoft didn't deserve to make the money that they have made, they should think about the money currently going towards curing 3rd world diseases and improving 3rd world education, curteousy of Bill, which otherwise might have end up being used to worsen conditions in the 3rd world, as many corporates do.
Are you sure about those election results? Maybe Bush wasn't popularly elected twice (maybe not even once). I'm sure a lot of very wealthy, powerful people breathed a very big sigh of relief when Bush got in instead of Al Gore. I mean living in the US might be as bad as living Europe by now if Al Gore had his way.
You are right 95% of people out there have no problems with CAPTCHAs, it's the 5% of people out there on the web who are visually impared or blind that have a hard time with them.
I'm someone who thinks denying the disabled access to services and information is even more lowly than taking away a nation's right to elect their leader democratically.
Well in terms of a completely automated approach, I think it's entirely possible for sites with a simple post mechanism and that this has actually been done and that spamming like you're suggesting is not actually profitable at all. From my own research on this topic spamming only begins to see worthwhile profits (ie $10K a year) when the number of spams they have made is well into the millions.
I created this blog two years ago and left it open for spammers as a test. A total of 6 spams have been posted, this might suggest blogspot has been crawled by bots a total of 6 times in the last two years. I've run other sites with similiar results. As a web administrator in my view it's not a big deal.
I think if you had a high profile site of course the results might be a little different. It's quite likely they would get specifically targeted as slashdot did a number of years ago (which is probably what started half of this paranoia).
However I wasn't talking about high profile sites, I'm talking about the vast bulk of the web which is mindlessly protected by CAPTCHAs.
I would still contend that if you could run stats on how many times CAPTCHAs have denied use of a site to someone visually impared, as opposed to a bot, the result would be one heavily biased towards inappropriate denial of service.
In my view this is immoral. Which is why as a developer I've created a project to try to do something about it, and why I've persisted trying to get my point across in this discussion, which has pushed a view point which in my view is based on fantasy and paranoia - not reality and therefore totally counter productive.
I think what you and every other person who has flamed me has failed to understand is the part where you simply say "submits a copy of the captcha". That's the complicated part!
I would be seriously interested in learning from you if you can suggest a plausible generic method for taking a random web page and determining the specific request for the CAPTCHA in the page (or if it has CAPTCHA at all).
I've made two assumptions in this discussion 1. That this concept could only possibly work if you presented the captcha as if it were part of the porn site, and that users of the site were totally unaware of the site's true purpose. 2. You could only make money out of this if once built it were an automated system i.e. with no significant day to day running costs (such as skilled technical labour).
Spammers usually like to remain anonymous... registering a domain name... hosting a web site... drawing thousands of people to that site announcing to all of them or a significant portion of them that they're spamming... You seriously think anyone is going to actually do this?
Basically what I've been so robustly flamed for trying to point out is that this is not as simple as it first seems. Of course it's technically possible, but well beyond the sophistication of normal spam operations, quite likely to require a lot of technical effort not just in it's initial setup but also in it's day to day running and because of this it's highly likely to fail as a money making scheme. Plus if you're not exiled to some lawless country, it's also more likely to get you arrested than normal spam operations. Anyhow it wasn't my intent to offend people by dismissing the power of porn.
What I was trying to say is I think security against spam on web sites is totally overhyped, i.e. not just the scheme proposed here, or that of teams of indians posting spam manually. I've had sites running for years without any protection. Yes, they have had spam posted to them, but it's really quite rare, and at this stage not what I would describe as a major problem.
The main focus of my post was not suppose to be the technical operations of a porn driven spam system it was to point out that if every web site removed their CAPTCHA protection the collective hassle and inconvenience of the spam you would end up would probably be insignificant to the inconvenience CAPTCHAs currently cause the blind and visually impared.
In reality the vast majority of web sites out there, with any level of protection, are going to stop spam 100% of the time.
Which is why I built my own text based CAPTCHA that is accessibility friendly.
False positives to spam bots are the problem with CAPTCHA images not false negatives.
Well with 700,000 Indian workers in Dubai which has a total population of 1 million, it's not that far off india, admittedly I've not been there myself.
As for the spelling, hmmm well I better discipline my team of Indian workers about that one.
Thanks for checking it out.
Microsoft renamed OS/2 3.0 to Windows NT 3.0 in 1991. The NT 3.1 beta was released and publicly available in July 1992, alpha versions were available to selected sites using OS/2.
Go google it if you don't believe me.
So yes I actually was using NT and OS/2 in 1992. If you're that offended by the untruths on my site, just don't visit it... at least until 2007 then it will all be 100% true.
I doubt people like me make you're life difficult, I'd say you do that all on your own.
I really don't get this, Google must have some of the best marketing dudes in the world when everyone thinks they smell like a rose, when they're in the business of making money through profiling people. They're collecting information on people by what they search for, the emails they send and receive, if you use Google desktop search they're collecting information off your PC and thanks to Google analytics and it's very very wide adoption (view source and search for urchintracker), they're also tracking a good percentage of pages people navigate to directly or through other search engines.
Personally I would trust Microsoft more than I trust Google. I don't want a server based computing model. I don't want to edit my text documents and spreadsheets and post private information across the net to a machine I have no control over. I'd prefer to pay for services up front than get them for free at some unknown cost that I pay for with my privacy.
Microsoft knows everything they ship is open to public scrutiny. Microsoft can't hide anything from you, the code is on your machine, it can be reverse engineered. There is no way they can stop you from monitoring network traffic between Windows and the net. With Google it's a completely closed black box system. Once you post information to their servers, all you have is blind faith that infomation will not be abused.
Maybe I'm paranoid, but I think having blind faith in any global corporate in this day and age is gullibility in the extreme. I don't need to have blind faith in Microsoft, I just know that their business model only works as long as their software is trusted (as opposed to their business tactics). Personally I have no sympathy for corporates no matter what trick or tactic has been used on them.
P.S To anyone with access to Slashdot's code can you please change the google analytics javascript to...
Microsoft renamed OS/2 to Windows NT in 1991... I think OS/2 has been around since about 1987... so that's more than 15 years.
But you're right, you have caught me I actually only have 14 years and 3 months professional dev experience. I just thought "one and a half decades" had a nice impressive ring to it. I'll run off and change my childish web site immediately so that it reads "about one and a half decades". Happy?
Someone would need to sit down, examine every site they want to attack, analyse it's HTML, find and pick out the CAPTCHA, then either copy the request for the captcha or determine some means of copying the graphic, and then determine the post request and store this in some sort of repository. The post request is going to be tricky as it will be site specific.
Excluding the actual running of the porn site, the day to day workload to keep this spamming operation sounds relatively time consuming compared with most spammming tactics. Plus the actual construction of the spamming infrastructure you're describing is by no means trivial.
Spammers don't go to this effort, they use techniques which are not as sophisticated or time consuming as this mainly because you have to make a lot of spam to get any return at all. I think you would probably end up making more money working at McDonalds than this sort of enterprise.
Well I've been working in Dubai and have met plenty who can barely understand english and manage to speak only partial sentences. In any case verbal skills are one thing, literacy is going to be another matter entirely.
There's no technical detail there. Go to any website see how many images it pulls, there are probably dozens. How do you pick which image is the CAPTCHA? The answer to that question is probably going to be unique to each site. Meaning your spammer is investing a lot of time and effort to create a spamming solution that works with a single site.
This is a hypothetical proposition. I don't think anyone has done this and I think there's a really good reason why.
OK so you're takling shit. There's not a single piece of technical information in anything you've said.
To point 4. How does Z "send a copy of the CAPTCHA" ?
How do you generically differentiate between, wallpaper, advertising and captcha images on a web page?
The answer is of course you can't. Maybe you could go by dimensions of the image. Or do some sort of OCR on each image to see if it contains CAPTCHA like stuff. But if you can OCR the thing you don't need horny porn dude at all do you?
Again I think you end up building an entire system just to post spam to one site, which would probably deal with your silly attack effectively and permanently within hours, or at most a day or two.
The solution is so bleeding obvious that I haven't done anybody with two brain cells to rub together a favor by posting it
Yea solutions are always obvious when you have no ability to implement them. Anyhow engaging in this discussion is getting a little embaressing. bye bye.
These would be the educated ones. Try going to Dubai or Mumbai. I'm not saying good English skills are uncommon in India, it's just not universal, and those who have good english language skills are usually able to do a little better for themselves than simple data entry earning $4USD a day i.e. about 1-2K USD per annum. With good skills in English Indian workers can earn between 5-50K USD per annum, depending on skills and qualifications. There's a big difference there and spammers are not going to be able to afford these people.
Slashdot Mirror
If you were really having to contend with bugs in IE 6.0 and 7.0 you would know this article is a total bs. I find it +5 interesting that a comment based on ignorance about an article based on ignorance gets modded +5 interesting.
I wouldn't say lies, it's more likely incompetance.
Yes. I think Microsoft has actually done a pretty good job on IE 7.0 and the Slashdot editors must be thinking to themselves... what's going on we haven't posted a critical article on IE in about 3 months, somethings wrong!! Oh wait here's an article... looks like FUD, but oh well, it's all we got, *post away*.
.NET development site I decided fixing this problem wasn't a high priority for me.
I've found IE 7.0 has actually helped me make my site more cross browser compliant. Before IE 7.0 my site did have some css issues causing some minor rendering problems in Safari on a MAC, it seemed to render fine in every other browser. Seeing as I don't own a MAC fixes were a little hard to test. Since the problem was minor and my site is a
When IE 7.0 came out I found I actually had problems similiar to what I was seeing in Safari. Played around 20mins later site was functioning perfectly in IE 7.0 and surprise surprise it was also looking good in Safari on a MAC. It also turned out to help me find a problem I hadn't previously been aware of with Opera style zooming.
I was using Firefox for all my surfing, of late I've actually found myself using IE 7.0, and I think Firefox is an awesome product, so IE 7.0 really can't be that bad. I only have positive things to say over the differences between IE 7.0 and 6.0.
*comic book guy voice* I concur. Worst article ever!
But you have to agree as long as we have a massive chunk of ice fall in to the sea every now and then, it should cool the seas...
Thus solving the problem of global warming once and for all!
"But..."
ONCE AND FOR ALLLLL !!!!
I read this head line and I thought this building has to be in Dubai and sure enough...
I've spent quite a lot of time there in the past couple of years. This project doesn't really surprise me at all.
It fits right in along side their project to build a business park filled with water that has more canals than Venice and Amsterdam put together, which coincidentally will contain the tallest building in the world the burj tower until they build the next tower to eclipse it that will be one kilometer tall. It also fits right along side a single hotel complex in the middle of the desert with 25,000 hotel rooms, more than all of Los Vegas put together, or their in-door ski park, or their three palm projects and the world artificial island projects and the list goes on and on...
I guarentee you that this building will not rotate entirely (or probably at all) off energy collected in solar cells. The energy required to rotate a skyscraper would be enourmous, I would think you'd be lucky to rotate a building once a decade off the energy collected through solar cells mounted on it.
It's just a gimmick.
In the UAE there are two main industries, property development and oil (in that order). This is just a gimmick to try and draw attention and investor dollars, there are so many mind bogglingly crazy projects in Dubai it really takes quite an effort to come up with something that stands out. By Dubai standards this is quite a moderate effort.
I wouldn't have a problem with this game if I thought it's makers were joking, but reading the interview, I don't think they are; I actually think these guys are serious. They truely believe their own lives are worth more than that of muslims.
This game is the equivalent of making a game about the jewish holocaust where you are a nazi and are rounding up jews to go to Auschwitz.
Jail isn't necessary for these people, nor killing them. What you can do though is let it be known that their behaviour is repugnant and socially unacceptable, rather than your current stance which tacitly gives these guys the nod to continue on down the path they're heading.
Alternatively, why don't you just spell it out and admit that secretly you actually find security in this fascist neo-conservative christian agenda? That if it came to pass that these guys had their way and the one in three people on this planet that are muslim were put to death that you wouldn't have a problem with it; because you're ignorant, you don't understand their culture, religion or customs and because of that you find them threatening.
In either case grow some balls for god-sake.
My girlfriend had a suggestion for altering this game that I think would make it OK. Just simply allow people to choose what religion is on the side of good, so you could then pick muslim as the true religion of god and have all the christians on the side of the anti-christ, that might even be closer to the truth.
Yes, some countries in Europe do imprison you for denying the holocaust; however the people in those same countries live in societies that are on the whole the most tolerant in the world.
And why do you think this is?
Because the one thing these countries have complete intolerance for are people with views that are intolerant of others of a different race or religion.
You see they've already tried the whole toleration of intolerance thing, it didn't work out too well with the Nazis and they're just not going there again.
So... are you going to wait for these neo-conservation Christian fruit cakes to actually start running round rounding up non-Christians into death camps before you stop riding that convenient little fence you're perched on?
And how you going to react to their next game title?
"NIGGER LYNCHING"
A game like the sims where you form your own white supremicist group and then go out finding niggers in small vunerable groups to bail into cars so you can take them out to a farm, beat the crap out of them and then lynch them, then dump their body somewhere. The aim of the game is to kill as many niggers as you can without being caught by evil FBI agents.
Cool game hey.
Well you're free to express your opionion, and I'm free to boycott these idiots, and encourage others to boycott them.
I think it's far more reprehensible that small minded people insist on imposing ther view of what is right and wrong on other people
It's ironic in the extreme that you make this comment defending a game that is so incredibly intollerant to non-christian beliefs. A game that depicts all muslims as evil and deserving death. How tolerant do you think we should be of such extreme intollerance?
Do you think people should have the freedom to religious expression without persecution ?
At what stage does one person's expression of their freedom become an abuse of anothers?
Do you have the freedom to walk down the street killing people? No of course you don't.
The fact is freedom is a privilege not a right, and when you abuse it in a decent society it is taken away from you e.g. when you kill someone you go to jail. These guys are treading a very thin line, encouraging people to adopt a neo-consertive christian view that is encourages violence or the acceptance of violence acts against non-christians.
Should we wait till neo-conservative fascists like these guys begin to round people up into death camps?
here...
. gsp?cu_heading=8
2 006/12/12/MNG8TMU1KQ1.DTL
http://www.walmart.com/cservice/cu_commentsonline
Here's what I sent to them.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/
So you haven't received any complaints about this game?
Well here's one. I find this totally offensive. For a company with such a high profile to be peddling crap like this and feeding the fires of racial and religious intolerance is totally unacceptable and completely reprehensible.
You have to be out of your minds to think this is a good way to make money. You can be sure you're never going to see a single dollar from my wallet not for this product or any other that you might choose to sell from here on. I'm sure there's thousands more reading this article and your response to it that are reacting the same way.
Perhaps you can buy the rights to sell dvds of the OJ interview "if i did it" and package it with this game as the ultimate bad taste christmas gift set.
No the real problem is all his creationalist whaco stuff got relisted. Sometimes censorship can be a good thing, it can save people from making complete idiots of themselves on line. Now I'm going back to work on my web site.... http://www.theearthisflat.org/
I think everything Microsoft has done has been completely ethical within the context of the global corporate system.
Breaking agreements, or acting upon an agreement that is inconsistent with the original spirit of the agreement is part and parcel of modern business practices. It's purely about the bottom line. If a corporate believes there is an advantage out of acting in a manner inconsistent with an agreement, than it will cost them in terms of possible law suits and litigation, then of course they are going to do the "unethical thing" and make a stack of money out of it.
This sort of stuff goes on all the time, as I write this I'm sure some company out there has just done something to shaft another for it's own advantage.
I really don't care about one company shafting another. I save my outrage over these sorts of practices for cases where a corporate is acting like this with the full knowledge that the harm that is inflicted is not just on some other corporate, but on real people. By this I don't mean financial harm but real bodily harm or death. E.g. Like companies that market products that they know may be harmful, or companies that corrupt political systems bringing civil disorder, starvation and/or war for corporate profit.
We all know this sort of stuff actually goes on. Microsoft hasn't been guilty of anything like this, so why focus your wrath on them?
In terms of Bill's ethics, I think in some ways especially in recent years he has acted far more ethically than most of his peers. His charity work is truely outstanding.
Before anyone goes on about how much Microsoft didn't deserve to make the money that they have made, they should think about the money currently going towards curing 3rd world diseases and improving 3rd world education, curteousy of Bill, which otherwise might have end up being used to worsen conditions in the 3rd world, as many corporates do.
As for point 2...
Are you sure about those election results? Maybe Bush wasn't popularly elected twice (maybe not even once). I'm sure a lot of very wealthy, powerful people breathed a very big sigh of relief when Bush got in instead of Al Gore. I mean living in the US might be as bad as living Europe by now if Al Gore had his way.
You are right 95% of people out there have no problems with CAPTCHAs, it's the 5% of people out there on the web who are visually impared or blind that have a hard time with them.
I'm someone who thinks denying the disabled access to services and information is even more lowly than taking away a nation's right to elect their leader democratically.
Well in terms of a completely automated approach, I think it's entirely possible for sites with a simple post mechanism and that this has actually been done and that spamming like you're suggesting is not actually profitable at all. From my own research on this topic spamming only begins to see worthwhile profits (ie $10K a year) when the number of spams they have made is well into the millions.
. html
As far as how big a problem it is...
http://dotnetmick.blogspot.com/2004/07/first-blog
I created this blog two years ago and left it open for spammers as a test. A total of 6 spams have been posted, this might suggest blogspot has been crawled by bots a total of 6 times in the last two years. I've run other sites with similiar results. As a web administrator in my view it's not a big deal.
I think if you had a high profile site of course the results might be a little different. It's quite likely they would get specifically targeted as slashdot did a number of years ago (which is probably what started half of this paranoia).
However I wasn't talking about high profile sites, I'm talking about the vast bulk of the web which is mindlessly protected by CAPTCHAs.
I would still contend that if you could run stats on how many times CAPTCHAs have denied use of a site to someone visually impared, as opposed to a bot, the result would be one heavily biased towards inappropriate denial of service.
In my view this is immoral. Which is why as a developer I've created a project to try to do something about it, and why I've persisted trying to get my point across in this discussion, which has pushed a view point which in my view is based on fantasy and paranoia - not reality and therefore totally counter productive.
I think what you and every other person who has flamed me has failed to understand is the part where you simply say "submits a copy of the captcha". That's the complicated part!
I would be seriously interested in learning from you if you can suggest a plausible generic method for taking a random web page and determining the specific request for the CAPTCHA in the page (or if it has CAPTCHA at all).
I've made two assumptions in this discussion
1. That this concept could only possibly work if you presented the captcha as if it were part of the porn site, and that users of the site were totally unaware of the site's true purpose.
2. You could only make money out of this if once built it were an automated system i.e. with no significant day to day running costs (such as skilled technical labour).
Spammers usually like to remain anonymous... registering a domain name... hosting a web site... drawing thousands of people to that site announcing to all of them or a significant portion of them that they're spamming... You seriously think anyone is going to actually do this?
Basically what I've been so robustly flamed for trying to point out is that this is not as simple as it first seems. Of course it's technically possible, but well beyond the sophistication of normal spam operations, quite likely to require a lot of technical effort not just in it's initial setup but also in it's day to day running and because of this it's highly likely to fail as a money making scheme. Plus if you're not exiled to some lawless country, it's also more likely to get you arrested than normal spam operations. Anyhow it wasn't my intent to offend people by dismissing the power of porn.
What I was trying to say is I think security against spam on web sites is totally overhyped, i.e. not just the scheme proposed here, or that of teams of indians posting spam manually. I've had sites running for years without any protection. Yes, they have had spam posted to them, but it's really quite rare, and at this stage not what I would describe as a major problem.
The main focus of my post was not suppose to be the technical operations of a porn driven spam system it was to point out that if every web site removed their CAPTCHA protection the collective hassle and inconvenience of the spam you would end up would probably be insignificant to the inconvenience CAPTCHAs currently cause the blind and visually impared.
In reality the vast majority of web sites out there, with any level of protection, are going to stop spam 100% of the time.
Which is why I built my own text based CAPTCHA that is accessibility friendly.
False positives to spam bots are the problem with CAPTCHA images not false negatives.
Well with 700,000 Indian workers in Dubai which has a total population of 1 million, it's not that far off india, admittedly I've not been there myself. As for the spelling, hmmm well I better discipline my team of Indian workers about that one. Thanks for checking it out.
Microsoft renamed OS/2 3.0 to Windows NT 3.0 in 1991. The NT 3.1 beta was released and publicly available in July 1992, alpha versions were available to selected sites using OS/2.
Go google it if you don't believe me.
So yes I actually was using NT and OS/2 in 1992. If you're that offended by the untruths on my site, just don't visit it... at least until 2007 then it will all be 100% true.
I doubt people like me make you're life difficult, I'd say you do that all on your own.
Anyhow thanks for the chat Anonymous Coward.
How has google earnt trust?
I really don't get this, Google must have some of the best marketing dudes in the world when everyone thinks they smell like a rose, when they're in the business of making money through profiling people. They're collecting information on people by what they search for, the emails they send and receive, if you use Google desktop search they're collecting information off your PC and thanks to Google analytics and it's very very wide adoption (view source and search for urchintracker), they're also tracking a good percentage of pages people navigate to directly or through other search engines.
Personally I would trust Microsoft more than I trust Google. I don't want a server based computing model. I don't want to edit my text documents and spreadsheets and post private information across the net to a machine I have no control over. I'd prefer to pay for services up front than get them for free at some unknown cost that I pay for with my privacy.
Microsoft knows everything they ship is open to public scrutiny. Microsoft can't hide anything from you, the code is on your machine, it can be reverse engineered. There is no way they can stop you from monitoring network traffic between Windows and the net. With Google it's a completely closed black box system. Once you post information to their servers, all you have is blind faith that infomation will not be abused.
Maybe I'm paranoid, but I think having blind faith in any global corporate in this day and age is gullibility in the extreme. I don't need to have blind faith in Microsoft, I just know that their business model only works as long as their software is trusted (as opposed to their business tactics). Personally I have no sympathy for corporates no matter what trick or tactic has been used on them.
P.S To anyone with access to Slashdot's code can you please change the google analytics javascript to...
_uacct = "UA-32013-5";
_udn = "slashdot.org";
if (typeof urchinTracker == 'function')
urchinTracker();
It'll save me getting javascript errors on every slashdot page I visit because I've blocked traffic from google analytics.
Microsoft renamed OS/2 to Windows NT in 1991... I think OS/2 has been around since about 1987... so that's more than 15 years.
But you're right, you have caught me I actually only have 14 years and 3 months professional dev experience. I just thought "one and a half decades" had a nice impressive ring to it. I'll run off and change my childish web site immediately so that it reads "about one and a half decades". Happy?
So in summary you are agreeing with me.
There is no obvious generic solution.
Someone would need to sit down, examine every site they want to attack, analyse it's HTML, find and pick out the CAPTCHA, then either copy the request for the captcha or determine some means of copying the graphic, and then determine the post request and store this in some sort of repository. The post request is going to be tricky as it will be site specific.
Excluding the actual running of the porn site, the day to day workload to keep this spamming operation sounds relatively time consuming compared with most spammming tactics. Plus the actual construction of the spamming infrastructure you're describing is by no means trivial.
Spammers don't go to this effort, they use techniques which are not as sophisticated or time consuming as this mainly because you have to make a lot of spam to get any return at all. I think you would probably end up making more money working at McDonalds than this sort of enterprise.
Well I've been working in Dubai and have met plenty who can barely understand english and manage to speak only partial sentences. In any case verbal skills are one thing, literacy is going to be another matter entirely.
There's no technical detail there. Go to any website see how many images it pulls, there are probably dozens. How do you pick which image is the CAPTCHA? The answer to that question is probably going to be unique to each site. Meaning your spammer is investing a lot of time and effort to create a spamming solution that works with a single site. This is a hypothetical proposition. I don't think anyone has done this and I think there's a really good reason why.
OK so you're takling shit. There's not a single piece of technical information in anything you've said.
To point 4. How does Z "send a copy of the CAPTCHA" ? How do you generically differentiate between, wallpaper, advertising and captcha images on a web page?
The answer is of course you can't. Maybe you could go by dimensions of the image. Or do some sort of OCR on each image to see if it contains CAPTCHA like stuff. But if you can OCR the thing you don't need horny porn dude at all do you?
Again I think you end up building an entire system just to post spam to one site, which would probably deal with your silly attack effectively and permanently within hours, or at most a day or two.
The solution is so bleeding obvious that I haven't done anybody with two brain cells to rub together a favor by posting it
Yea solutions are always obvious when you have no ability to implement them. Anyhow engaging in this discussion is getting a little embaressing. bye bye.
These would be the educated ones. Try going to Dubai or Mumbai. I'm not saying good English skills are uncommon in India, it's just not universal, and those who have good english language skills are usually able to do a little better for themselves than simple data entry earning $4USD a day i.e. about 1-2K USD per annum. With good skills in English Indian workers can earn between 5-50K USD per annum, depending on skills and qualifications. There's a big difference there and spammers are not going to be able to afford these people.