At 8:52 PM -0600 3/14/03, Scott A Crosby wrote:
auto-reply. Although, CAPTCHA could make this work. CAPTCHA (carnegie
mellon) is an idea to have an automated challenge that a computer can
give to a human, but only humans can correctly reply; a machine
cannot. Its done currently on Yahoo, its that swirly text image thats
designed to be difficult to OCR.
As I pointed out on some earlier threads. This needs to be both
visual and aural if you want to pass accessibly standards. Doable
(and done in some cases). Just keep it in mind.
I have heard from one person, who says he read it in Wired, and found
one online mention
(http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2002/12/26/tech/main534348.shtml)
claiming that some spammers have set up "free porn" sites that
occasionally prompt the user to enter a value on a CAPTCHA-style
image snarfed from a webmail site. This is sort of the borg approach
to distributed computing.
I'd love to see a real reference to this. But certainly it seems
like a viable countermeasure.
In the end, every system has a weakness. Either in terms of
deployment, the social cost of using it, or the ability to work
around it if you are clever enough. As someone else has pointed out
on this list--dealing with spam is really like dealing with security.
It's not going to be a on/off thing. It's going to be a question of
how much pain you are willing to put up with in order to gain a
certain amount of benefit.
--
Kee Hinckley
http://www.puremessaging.com/ Junk-Free Email Filtering
http://commons.somewhere.com/buzz/ Writings on Technology and Society
I'm not sure which upsets me more: that people are so unwilling to accept
responsibility for their own actions, or that they are so eager to regulate
everyone else's.
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