Spam Bots and CAPTCHAs

They changed their tune over at my.opera.com on 10 March 2007 and the image-based CAPTCHA was replaced with a text-based one. No doubt the folks at Opera were tired of dealing with SPAM Bots that danced their way around the CAPTCHA images, so they decided to give text phrases a try.

This is actually the first time that I’ve seen a major popular site working with text-based CAPTCHA, and I was kind of surprised. Popular sites like my.opera.com are often the targets of specialized SPAM Bots that are designed specifically to defeat that one site’s defenses. Apparently the text gates are holding strong in this case, because they are still employing it.

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CAPTCHA routines are kind of like the flesh-eating dudes in those zombie flicks. They’re dead, but someone forgot to tell them. Well, the obituary was been written for CAPTCHA long ago, but the concept continues to live. Now, it seems, the word is finally starting to spread and more and more webmasters are starting to show up for the funeral.

CAPTCHA, or more precisely Completely Automated Public Turing Test to Tell Computers and Humans Apart, uses images to try and stop spammers. The problem is, the spammers have written some darn good image recognition software and that’s when CAPTCHA’s death knoll sounded.

So, what is it that the spam slayers are starting to support? SAPTCHA (Semi Automatic Public Turing Test to Tell Computers and Humans Apart).

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