CAPTCHA
I had a "Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart" installed on the comic comment pages for the C-Realm on-line comic because I had been getting hundreds of spam comments a day. The CAPTCHA worked perfectly for a time, now some spam is starting to get through. Someone, it seems, thinks it of the utmost importance that readers of the C-Realm comic know where to find an on-line poker game.
A story in the current issue of Wired magazine claims that more than half of all blogs are spam blogs assembled by bots which snatch passages of text from real blogs that contain popular search terms and patch them together into gibberish Frankenblogs. The spam blogger doesn't imagine that anyone will read the resulting train wreck of a blog, but they hope that someone landing in such a mash-up mess will navigate out by clicking on an ad link rather than backing up to the search results page that lead them there. I'm tempted to say something nasty about the amoral attitudes fostered by our global system of resource distribution, but I'm making a renewed effort to focus on the positive.
Let's see. Uh... I sure do like getting the dead tree version of Wired magazine in my mailbox for a dollar an issue. Oh wait, I've got it. Spammers help lift poor people in the so-called "Third World" out of poverty by paying them $0.60 an hour to solve the Turing Tests website owners throw in the way of spam bots. Help end global poverty. Support spam!
link: http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/09/06/1217240&from=rss
A story in the current issue of Wired magazine claims that more than half of all blogs are spam blogs assembled by bots which snatch passages of text from real blogs that contain popular search terms and patch them together into gibberish Frankenblogs. The spam blogger doesn't imagine that anyone will read the resulting train wreck of a blog, but they hope that someone landing in such a mash-up mess will navigate out by clicking on an ad link rather than backing up to the search results page that lead them there. I'm tempted to say something nasty about the amoral attitudes fostered by our global system of resource distribution, but I'm making a renewed effort to focus on the positive.
Let's see. Uh... I sure do like getting the dead tree version of Wired magazine in my mailbox for a dollar an issue. Oh wait, I've got it. Spammers help lift poor people in the so-called "Third World" out of poverty by paying them $0.60 an hour to solve the Turing Tests website owners throw in the way of spam bots. Help end global poverty. Support spam!
link: http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/09/06/1217240&from=rss