Improving a CAPTCHA - An idea

re: Improving a CAPTCHA - An idea

William — Wed, 02 Feb 2005 02:02:00 GMT

Bill:

i get spammed tons on DNJ and spend around 30 minutes a day going through my comments to remove shit!

that's 30x31/60=15 1/2 hours a month..could of course be that the reason it takes me so long is because i get pretty sqlparameter errors half the time..

anyways it all adds up and i for one is fed up with it..i think i'll have to look into this some more! maybe find some way to get around it - but with smart people like KC out there it's really damn hard..

could we vote for a frontal lobotomy for KC - at least to bring his brain functions down to a normal level?

re: Improving a CAPTCHA - An idea

William — Tue, 01 Feb 2005 01:22:00 GMT

Brian:

Actually it wouldn't - that's what KC's point about Social Engineering and Yahoo was. We don't get spammed enough for it to be a big deal - this thing is consuming wayyyyyyyyyyyy too much energy ;-)

re: Improving a CAPTCHA - An idea

William — Tue, 01 Feb 2005 01:17:00 GMT

It would all be stopped if you had a registration process...

simple as that.. :)

re: Improving a CAPTCHA - An idea

William — Mon, 31 Jan 2005 23:05:00 GMT

I got the perfect solution. Tell every company out there who does any OCR work to stop. Stop teaching your computer character recognition and we can develop a CAPTCHA that will be hard(er) to recognize.

Casey is right though. As long as computers generate it, a computer can read it (eventually). As we put more "humanity" into computers trying to tell them apart will become more difficult as time progresses. Eventually this will become a big enough problem to throw a real solution at (CAPTCHA specifically, not comment spam it's already big enough with no solutions). Trying to tell a human and computer apart in 50 years may be physically impossible if we don't start dealing with it now. Using that as a method to combat spam is dumb though because even spammers are people and they can circumvent it anyway. It prevents bot spam or mass spamming but again doesn't solve the root cause, just a symptom.

Hopefully other people will realize why CAPTCHA isn't good enough for comment spam. It's a layer, a very annoying layer that helps but doesn't cure. Hopefully now that it's becoming easier to break these things, people will get rid of them altogether for real solutions. I don't think anything can be a cure to the problem though but through a couple of layers can slow spam down to being almost negligable.

re: Improving a CAPTCHA - An idea

William — Mon, 31 Jan 2005 15:10:00 GMT

Yah, you're probably right.

re: Improving a CAPTCHA - An idea

William — Mon, 31 Jan 2005 15:09:00 GMT

i dont think thats the way to go. computers have gotten good at doing character recognition ... even with a bunch of noise. CAPTCHA really needs to use something that computers arent good at yet ... which is natural language processing. then the problem is you have to have a large dictionary of questions

re: Improving a CAPTCHA - An idea

William — Mon, 31 Jan 2005 14:52:00 GMT

Sorry I meant HREFs

re: Improving a CAPTCHA - An idea

William — Mon, 31 Jan 2005 10:21:00 GMT

Why don't we have something like ---

5 or more comments in your comment - and the blog gives the comment poster a 110V Jolt thru two wires taped to his nipples.

re: Improving a CAPTCHA - An idea

William — Mon, 31 Jan 2005 09:42:00 GMT

Andy: them "helookslike" nearly cracked me up here!!! was reading it while on the phone with a client (on hold actually) and couldn't stop laughing when i was connected!!!

damn that was some funny shite!

re: Improving a CAPTCHA - An idea

William — Mon, 31 Jan 2005 06:44:00 GMT

Dude it's been an interesting day for sure with the CAPTCHA episode.

We all could use some comic relief.

So for funny comic relief go to this site I just found. It will totally make you laugh and take your mind off all things tech:
http://helookslike.blogspot.com/

I d@mn near sh!t myself I laughed so hard at some of these.