Maybe I like the CAPTCHA After all - The lesser of Two Evils.

Comments

# William said on July 30, 2005 6:19 PM:

Dude what is with the pastel colors?

# William said on July 30, 2005 7:09 PM:

What we need is an animated "captcha control" that doesn't display the image all the time, but will display the general message every few seconds. It could switch between pictures to words, to simple concepts like finishing a flash-based tic-tac-toe game before posting. Sure, these concepts can still be beaten over time, but if the animations and concepts change every so often the spam will be reduced.

# William said on July 30, 2005 8:23 PM:

Andy - It's the OneNote skin. I know, it's sort of unheterosexual - but it's the only one I found w/out a capthca.

Tobin- what about my idea for smacking the Phishers? Let's figure out a way to use Jaxass to do it

# William said on July 30, 2005 11:06 PM:

Why don't you just set up a bayesian filter on the comment database, train it, then call it good. They can spam you all they want then and you should have about zero problems same as I do with my e-mail.

unheterosexual - Well that's not exactly what I would call it. I thought it was more along the lines of "Gayer than a can of Homo-Cola and a tube of Astro glide".

I'll take the CAPTCHA over the queer color scheme any day.

# William said on July 30, 2005 11:10 PM:

I figured you'd have a less sensitive (and more funny description) for it. BTW, now that I'm back in Augusta, I"ll be back on that other company I really liked that's not Charter. So you'll have to hook a brother up with the cool package. Anyway, I don't have access to the db but I may mention it to Susan b/c she's kicks a33 and is pretty hip about stuff. Anatoly had tipped me off to the trackback spam so I was looking for a way to get rid of it, and using filtering will stop people from hitting it w/ the API (which apparently is the way they're pulling it off now)

# William said on July 30, 2005 11:16 PM:

Is it true that Homo cola comes in a Rainbow can? BTW, if you click on that peace march link (and check out this ) http://www.zombietime.com/churchill_in_bay_area/churchill_sf_anarchist_bookfair_march_26_2005/156-5635_IMG.JPG Well, that's really gay.

BTW, I know that a lot of lefties deny that they are Anti-American (and some of them definitely aren't) but check this shit out http://www.zombietime.com/hall_of_shame/ Since you were in the military, I figured you may find them 'interesting'

# William said on July 30, 2005 11:17 PM:

(in case you were wondering, notice the dude's Inflated bag) but be prepared to barf. Do you think his boy on the right also drinks the cola?

# William said on July 30, 2005 11:29 PM:

Yuck on the Homo sh!t!!!

I am extremelly pro-zionist to the point where I considered going over and joining the IDF for few years. No, I'm not Jewish but I am pro-Isreal. So yeah I'd like to smash those protestors f#cking faces in.

# TrackBack said on July 31, 2005 12:27 AM:

According to the shirt, "I Kicked Arsch at Germanfest Sheepshead".  Yeah, that's right, I won the...

# William said on July 31, 2005 4:18 AM:

DoubleI,

There are a number of vigilante groups, mostly in Europe that go around and find spam sites. They target sites that attempt to deliver spam with spyware and viruses. They typically hack the spam site, shut it down or disable it from delivering spam/spyware/viruses (temporarily), and leave a message. The most famous of the groups (in the public media) is the "Lad Wrecking Crew". They have knocked out some bank phishing sites.

Microsoft's Honey Monkeys are another example of this type of behavior.

http://www.jjbresearch.org/acs/blogs/optionsscalper/archive/2005/05/25/BananasForMonkeys.aspx

I don't know the laws regarding this activity in the US, but my suspicion is that it isn't legal. I'd compare that to many of the classic '70s movies where the perpetrator gets off on a technicality and Dirty Harry or Charles Bronson has to go and blow the guy away. It feels good and is likely "just", but the vigilante gets away with it.

The Armed Geometer has a great idea with the Bayes protection. I'm surprised that there is not more media coverage of this approach. I've even turned away from this approach for a few years. I did a considerable amount of model work on Wall Street that had models founded in Bayes Theory. I didn't care for the approach, but that was because most guys on the Street were not doing a good job of characterizing models with the Bayes approach. After a few quick emails with TAG, I'm convinced that this merits serious consideration. Many of the advantages of the Neural Net approach and foundations in the perceptron actually have similar ideas in Bayes Theory, i.e. strong pattern recognition given well characterized data in training. The email/spam or blog post/blog spam relationships appear to "fit" these characterizations.

More thoughts on this later. Bed time and more cards to play tomorrow . . .

---O

# TrackBack said on August 27, 2005 8:43 PM:

Maybe I like the CAPTCHA After all - The lesser of Two Evils.ooeess