About nine month ago I wrote an article about funny CAPTCHAS (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart) floating around the web.
As a little remark I pointed out that CAPTCHAS might be a temporary solution against comment spamming, automatic account generation, and so on, but that these might easily be bypassed with some cheap tricks:
But don’t think that Captchas will be a permanent solution to comment and forum Spam. You can easily hire a bunch of low-wage workers and let them solve these tasks for you. Or even cheaper: Create a porn or warez site to attract traffic and feed the challenges to clueless humans who want to enter.
It looks like this has become reality now.
Via heise.de.
I hope that one day users will think about what they’re doing… :)
I just read that SPAM is getting 30 today. Congratulations!
On May 3rd, 1978, about 400 mailboxes got flooded by the first unsolicited email advertisement in history! According to heise.de it is estimated that the current spam volume is about 100 billion spam mails per year. The signal to noise ratio is as low as 15%.
[Read the rest of this posting]Rather old, but I just read that Mailinator offers a bunch of alternate domains for its free, save from sign-up, and easy to use Spam-Mail service.
anythingYouWant@PutThisInYourSpamDatabase.comanythingYouWant@ThisIsNotMyRealEmail.comanythingYouWant@binkmail.comanythingYouWant@SpamHerePlease.comanythingYouWant@SpamHereLots.comanythingYouWant@SendSpamHere.comanythingYouWant@chogmail.comanythingYouWant@SpamThisPlease.comanythingYouWant@frapmail.comanythingYouWant@obobbo.comanythingYouWant@devnullmail.comThis really comes handy, as anything@mailinator.com is usually blocked. Maybe they'll come up with some kind of random domains that change on a daily basis. Shouldn't be that expensive.
Usage: You don't need to sign up for this service. Just start using your address with some more or less random name in front of the "@". If you want to read your mail, go over to mailinator.com and enter that address. As no password is required, you shouldn't use this for sensitive information and I suggest using a random name that at least hide your login information and such.
Tip: They provide RSS-Feeds for your inbox, so you don't have to check your spambox every five minutes....
Spam is an omnipresent problem on the Internet these days. Not only email is affected with approximately 100 billion Spam mails a day, but also search engines, instant messaging services, forums, and blog comments.
One temporary solution to reduce Spam in wikis, forums and blogs are reverse Turing tests or Captchas (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart).
Captchas are little tasks you have to solve in order to prove that you're human. Most of them display some distorted and noisy letters that you have to identify and reenter to pass.
For now these Captchas cannot be handled efficiently by computers; as such, the spreading of Spam is reduced drastically.
However, there are some very strange Captchas on the net. Some of them unintentionally offend you (e.g. the letters read as "fuckoff"), some of them are indecipherable, and others expect too much intelligence from the average internet user.
Here's a list of funny Captchas on the web.
A rather complicated Captcha
But don't think that Captchas will be a permanent solution to comment and forum Spam. You can easily hire a bunch of low-wage workers and let them solve these tasks for you. Or even cheaper: Create a porn or warez site to attract traffic and feed the challenges to clueless humans who want to enter.
In fact, that's kind of what reCaptcha does...
According to reCaptcha's site around 60 million Captchas are solved every day. If every challenge takes 10 seconds to solve you end up with about 160.000 hours a day. Time that might be used for something useful.
The reCaptcha project uses this time to digitize old books, that are resistant to OCR. So, instead of random letters real words from real books have to be identified. With this, word by word, complete books from the Internet Archive will be digitized.
reCaptcha in action.
Everybody who wants to support this can use reCaptchas-API for free. Many CMS's and blogging systems like Drupal, Wordpress or Serendipity allready support reCaptcha via plugins.
“Dressed Up As Life” von den Sick Puppies hab ich eher zufällig endeckt und bin mächtig beeindruckt. Solider Mainstreamhardrock, mal ruhiger, mal mit energiegeladenen Riffs, mitziehende Bassline und vor allem nie langweilig.
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