There are public algorithms with methods to defeat captchas. I haven't
looked into the version used by Wikipedia, but compared to some other
versions that are cracked it seems likely it isn't safe. (Actually the
basic technique used by the version in Wikipedia has some serious design
flaws that makes it possible to crack it by brute force, not that I find
it very likely that anyone will try this.)
John E
Aaron Schulz skrev:
Actually, account creation has a captcha, so it
wouldn't be using
accounts likely.
-Aaron Schulz
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From: jschulz_4587(a)msn.com
To: wikiquality-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
Date: Fri, 21 Dec 2007 19:55:04 -0500
Subject: Re: [Wikiquality-l] Wikipedia colored according to trust
That would still be quite a feat. The bot would have to IP hop
over several A-classes. Make some random vandalism that looks like
random vandalism (rather than the same set of garbage or random
characters/blanking). The IP would have to change enough for it to
not look like one bot on RC. The good bot would have to give a
time pause before reverting to let other beat it to the punch.
Also, if all it did was revert bad bot, then as I said, the bad
bot's IP would really have to be all over the place, unless the
bot made random accounts too. It would still take a while to build
up trust this way...and even with the max, it will still take
several edits to get bad content white. This would have to be good
enough to set the "most trusted" version. And even if this is done
on some pages, it will get reverted and the user blocked, and they
have to use another "good bot".
It certainly is always better to be less easily spoofed, and if
there are good practical things that can stop this without making
the software too underinclusive, I'm all for it. I said earlier
that users in the formal bot group should not count as adding
credibility. In this vein, we could do the opposite and have
groups that increase the max trust (credits) a user can have. That
way the default max trust can be lowered to deal further with
stuff like good/bad bot networks. This would work if integrated
with FlaggedRevs, as the 'editor' group could have a higher max
trust limit.
-Aaron Schulz
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