This blog is retired.
Just stumbled upon the article “Using AI to beat CAPTCHA and post comment spam”. There is a number of projects related to breaking CAPTCHAs and a number of articles on the topic, but this article strikes me most, because of:
Recently I analyzed HotScripts.com section “PHP :: Scripts and Programs :: Security Systems”. Looking through the all 9 pages, I identified 5 categories:
* CAPTCHAs,
* crawler protection,
* login, users, groups, roles, rights, authentification,
* data encryption,
* PHP and HTML source code encryption.
As one expects, the biggest category is “CAPTCHAs”. But how to select the best one?
I already wrote about the CAPTCHA I like most. Just to repeat, here it is:
Recently I found a very nice collection, don’t miss it: Craziest Captchas on the Web.
You can have the best anti-spam protection on the planet and still find yourself getting spammed by actual human beings who aren’t using any robots. Fortunately, with the number of forums and blogs on the ‘net, the chances of yours getting targeted by the lone typing monkey is slim. Even so, it does happen.
CAPTCHA has been broken. Not just once, but over and over again. In fact, do a search for “CAPTCHA breaker” or “CAPTCHA hack” and you’ll find plenty of web sites that are all too happy to tell spammers how to get around the image tokens that CAPTCHA scripts use to try to keep unwanted people out.
Someone has asked Google how to bypass Textual Confirmation. Great! The alternative to CAPTCHA is taking off, even spammers noticed it. Now they’ve started to think about bypassing. Would you mind to help them and share ideas?
Here’s a not-so-funny joke that actually has a whole lot more to do with protecting your blog from spam than you might think. The joke is from the article discussed in my last blog entry. If you recall I said I’d speculate on the meaning of this joke next time around. So here’s the joke for all you who’ve not taken time to read Ned’s article about a simple way to protect your site:
For all the havoc spambots wreak on blogs their presence has actually done some good. You see, these annoying creatures from cyberspace have brought out the creative sides of blog owners determined to win this Battle of the Blogs.
To make my point read this post by Ned Batchelder titled,
There’s lots of controversy surrounding whether or not guest posts are good for blogs. And still there doesn’t seem to be any right answer. So today I’m going to share my point of view.
While poking around the Internet I came across this article about ways to stop PHPBB spam. In it the author talks about 2 tools he believes everyone running a phpBB board needs. What’s nice about the article is that it isn’t a cleverly disguised plug for these products. Instead it’s an independent review so you can be sure these products really work.
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