Just wait.. the technology behind IBM's Watson will end up in the hands of spammers and then there'll be no stopping the spam ;-)
--- On Thu, 3/10/11, Dan Kohn dan@dankohn.com wrote:
From: Dan Kohn dan@dankohn.com Subject: Re: [Mediawiki-l] Spam account creation, circumventing recaptcha To: "MediaWiki announcements and site admin list" mediawiki-l@lists.wikimedia.org Date: Thursday, March 10, 2011, 10:10 AM Sol, I'd like to confirm your analysis. I switched from ReCaptcha to QuestyCaptcha with a custom question http://www.pwsnotes.org/Special:RecentChanges?title=Special:UserLogin&type=signup&returnto=Special:RecentChanges and have seen no further spam.
So, it looks like someone has programmed a MediaWiki/ConfirmEdit-focused spambot that can defeat SimpleCatcha (simple math problems) and -- shockingly -- ReCaptcha. But not that they're using human beings to do the spamming. So, QuestyCaptcha, for now, still works well. -- Dan Kohn mailto:dan@dankohn.com tel:+1-646-833-8291
On Tue, Mar 8, 2011 at 2:21 PM, Sol Invictus solinvic@gmail.com wrote:
I don't think that's the case; my logs show pretty
much instant data
entry. They must have found some way to break the
service itself. I
switched to Questy with some simple things like "type
the word X" or
"sum(2,3)" and it seems to be blocking them all so
far.
On Tue, Mar 8, 2011 at 10:43 AM, Dan Kohn dan@dankohn.com
wrote:
My www.PWSNotes.org MediaWiki site, which I've
operated since 2004,
has been overrun with spam in the last month. I
used Nuke to clean it
up. Unfortunately, neither ConfirmEdit with
ReCaptcha nor
SpamBlacklist is stopping the spammers. I
interpret this as meaning
that real people are doing the spamming. I just
installed
ConfirmAccount, which I expect should bring the
spam to an end, at the
unfortunate cost of making it harder for new
people to contribute to
our community.
Bummer.
Dan Kohn mailto:dan@dankohn.com tel:+1-646-833-8291
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