So my dad, in a comment for the post about nicknames (yes, I remember all of those nicknames rather fondly and you obviously still use them), asked about the word verification stuff for comments. It has to do with comment spam and computer vision.
Spammers don't just stop at junk mail, telemarketing phone calls, and email. They have gone as far as doing comment spam for blogs. They have software that just searches the Net for blogs that accept comments, and drop in comments advertising stuff. This is especially prevalent on site like Blogger where it is easy to figure if a site has comments enabled based on the fact it comes from the site and has a consistent way of denoting commenting being available. It is also a problem for blogging software programs like Movable Type where you can just Google for blogs and look for their common way for handling comments.
So, to combat programs that automatically fill in comment spam, word verification is used. AI researchers have yet to have come up with a good way for computers to be able to identify distorted letters and numbers in a quick fashion (they can do it in a very expensive manner, but since spamming only works based on volume it becomes too costly to use the systems that mostly work). So by having the word verification it provides something that is easy for human beings but hard for programs to deal with.
But of course the spammers are getting around this as well. Now they hire cheap labor to just spend all day typing what the images look like. So, for instance, they have a program that hits up all the various places that require word verification, take the image, send to another program that puts it in front of a human being, they type in what they think it is, and then the program sends it back to be used. Got to love unscrupulous people.
2 comments:
I was listening to TWIT last week and they were talking about a setting in Apache that will check and prevent a post that was not within the same domain. I guess the idea was that if you are not posting from the post comment page, then you must be a automated scripts trying to spam from somewhere else. Dvorsak says his comment spam went down by a large amount. They were wondering why no one knew about this setting... I guess everyone is using IIS :P
one of these days i'll get me blog up again, too. and i'll put some sort of picture blog up. i was thinking of using this neat little freeware:
http://www.airtightinteractive.com/simpleviewer/
j
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