On Thu, Mar 10, 2011 at 11:10 AM, Dan Kohn dan@dankohn.com wrote:
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.
It's not really that shocking: reCAPTCHA isn't different from any other CAPTCHA, and even if a bot can only get it right 1% of the time, it can generally try new images until it gets one right.
I actually don't think there's any guarantee that it's not humans solving the CAPTCHAs: spammers could well be farming it out to humans and have just not yet added the infrastructure to support question-based CAPTCHAs (which are a rather small segment of the market and are more site-specific).
On Thu, Mar 10, 2011 at 11:49 AM, 2007@gmaskfx.com 2007@gmaskfx.com wrote:
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 ;-)
Funny, I had the same thought. The good news is that we'll have Watson-like ClueBots detecting and reverting spam by that point. In the end, it will just be machines engaged in an automated edit war. :-)