Fight with spam
In the few months that this blog has been running, akismet (“the collaborative effort to make spam a non-issue”) has caught about 4000 spam comments.
Most sites use CAPTCHA to determine legitimate users. A friend recently told me about a new method that spammers are using to circumvent CAPTCHA. A site with high demand content (like free music or porn) harvests CAPCTCHA on demand from another site and displays it to a user. The user is able to decode the text and types in the correct text, which in turn is used to spam the site where the CAPTCHA is taken from.
This is incredible.
A more useful version of this technique is reCAPTCHA. Instead of posting spam, the user is presented with words from a book that is currently being digitized, some of it correctly recognized by software and some incorrectly. This is compared with what others have typed in, and if correct, your comment is posted and the words added back to the database.
I’m trying to figure out if the evil way or the good way was thought of first. I’m guessing evil.