On Thu, Dec 16, 2004 at 06:27:30AM -0800, Jo Walsh wrote:
I fear that the way this is going, there is going to
have to be a
'proof of humanity' test, e.g. recognising numbers that are heavily
distorted on a noisy background like all the free web/mail services now
do.
Unfortunately, even these are doomed. Firstly, because there are always more
black-hat programmers who are willing to try and beat them (for a white-hat
example, see:
http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~mori/gimpy/gimpy.html ); and
secondly, because "they'll hire child workers to read your images and
manually register/post/ping/trackback/whatever. (Already happening.)" [I
don't know if it /is/ already happening, but it sounds feasible.] -
http://diveintomark.org/archives/2003/11/15/more-spam
i am not crazy about having to log into websites,
especially in wiki,
If it requires a login, it is not wiki. It may seem a lot like wiki, but it
is not wiki. It is almost-wiki.
Or this?
http://downlode.org/perl/spamtrap/spamtrap.cgi
designed to wreak search-based web-email-crawler
revenge on certain
addresses?
Designed to be email-spider honey traps. Any spam poisoner should use
robots.txt or a meta robots header to block all robots (mine does); that way
the legitimate search engine robots will ignore their recursive black holes
of gibberish and only black-hat spiders will get sucked in. In theory.
webspam of this kind makes less sense.
If it shows up on the web it's because the programmer hasn't robot-banned
it. More pernicious are the scads of websites made of random words at random
URLs that do nothing but redirect you to some wanker trying to sell you
something. Or those people who go buying up expired domains (like
earlemartin.com! Yay!).
--
Earle Martin
http://downlode.org/
http://purl.oclc.org/net/earlemartin/