[FRIAM] Comment Spam!

[James Steiner]

On 10/30/06, Owen Densmore <owen at backspaces.net> wrote:
> Holy cow!  I hadn't any idea just how far folks had to go to protect
> themselves!  The fact that OCR doesn't help is quite surprising to
> me.  Good article, thanks.

Well, that's the whole idea, right? CAPTCHAs were invented with the
intent that they are unreadable by even good OCR, thus not readily
machine-translatable, thus decent assurance that a human, and not an
automated process, is entering that comment or creating that free
email account. So, rather than detecting and removing comment spam
*after* they are created, you prevent them from being created in the
first place.

The good news in Atwood's article for me is that CAPTCHAs don't have
to be so terribly obfuscated that they become illegible to humans,
too. I've seen some really hard-to-read CAPTCHAs, and I'm hopeful that
mroe focus is put on making tests that are *easy* for humans to read,
but hard for computers...not hard for both, or worse, hard for humans
but easy for computers!

I imagine that the next-hardest thing will be CAPTCHAs that are
animations, where all the letters don't appear in the frame at the
same time, or in the correct order.

~~James
__________
http://turtlezero.com