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(a)dankohn.com> wrote:
From: Dan Kohn <dan(a)dankohn.com>
Subject: Re: [Mediawiki-l] Spam account creation, circumventing recaptcha
To: "MediaWiki announcements and site admin list"
<mediawiki-l(a)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(a)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(a)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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