CAPTCHA

Scientific American: Baffling the Bots — Anti-spammers take on automatons posing as humans on
“completely automated public Turing test to tell computers and humans apart” (CAPTCHA):

“This is our arms race,” he says. “There’s no question that bots are going to become more and more sophisticated.”




Image: HENRY S. BAIRD PARC

Note that I’ve heard rumors of (or at least predictions of) CAPTCHA-workaround systems that farm out recognition work to pools of humans, e.g. by presenting them to users of other heavily-trafficed sites. If anybody has a specific example of that, I’d like to know.

Update: Thanks to Yakov Shafranovich for pointing out
Matt McCay’s weblog pointing to a
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette article citing Luis von Ahn at CMU as the source of this:

But at least one potential spammer managed to crack the CAPTCHA test. Someone designed a software robot that would fill out a registration form and, when confronted with a CAPTCHA test, would post it on a free porn site. Visitors to the porn site would be asked to complete the test before they could view more pornography, and the software robot would use their answer to complete the e-mail registration.

3 Comments

  1. SPEWS is back and an exploit for CAPTCHAs

    Well, it seems that SPEWS is back, no explanation on what happened of course. Also, today I ran across an article about how a spammer was able to defeat the visual Turing tests used by some C/R systems: But at…

  2. SPEWS is back and an exploit for CAPTCHAs

    Well, it seems that SPEWS is back, no explanation on what happened of course. Also, today I ran across an article about how a spammer was able to defeat the visual Turing tests used by some C/R systems: But at…

  3. SPEWS is back and an exploit for CAPTCHAs

    Well, it seems that SPEWS is back, no explanation on what happened of course. Also, today I ran across an article about how a spammer was able to defeat the visual Turing tests used by some C/R systems: But at…

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