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Re: [Asrg] Its all over for Challenge Response

2004-01-29 10:45:49
At 09:02 AM 1/28/2004, you wrote:
Hallam-Baker, Phillip wrote:
spammers have found a way to break C/R schemes that have a 'turing test'
component.
You simply set up a free porn web site and get people to crack the turing
tests in return for seeing the porn.

Yes. I agree  ... Sort of.

However, let's put it this way. Even with all the "free" porn sites that could potentially be set up and even with the potentially large number of vistors that they could have, it would still be a signficant drop in the amount of spam. I doubt that many would hang around a free porn site for long if they had to type/decypher a CR each time they switched pages. It would simply be too irritating. And besides, let's say a visitor visits 20-50 pages, that would mean that for one spammer's spam to get through to 1,000,000 addresses, they would need an equal number of page views or 20,000-50,000 visitors -- a lot for any free porn site. And of course, there are all the other spammers trying to do the same thing diluting the potential number of visitors. This would still be a major bottleneck.

This sort of workaround seems to make sense for automating some things such as getting a Yahoo/Hotmail account or similar. But it doesn't seem very practical to me for sending out millions of pieces of junk mail.

-Art
--
Art Pollard
http://www.lextek.com/
Suppliers of High Performance Text Retrieval Engines.


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