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.
recently i've notice a lot of pages like this, for example: http://joyce.eng.yale.edu/~bt/school/report.cgi/draft/kennecott.htm
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!).