[extropy-chat] Blog spam

[David Lubkin]

Mike Lorrey wrote:

>This doesn't defeat the primary means of beating captchas. The primary
>means is for the spammer to set up a porn site with free porn, which
>only requires the user read the captcha, but the captcha is grabbed by
>the porn site from a legit site, so the spammer is using porn seekers
>to do his decoding for him, so he can access legit sites without
>spending a lot of time on captchas.
>
>It also doesn't defeat the exploit of hiring poor people in India at
>$10 a day to do nothing but read captchas. Developing world english
>speakers are a cheap Turing machine.

As with other measure/counter-measure escalations, e.g., privacy 
(Brin) or protecting IP (Stallman), the question arises as to why 
bother? Blocking spam is a reasonable goal, but most of the sites I 
see captchas on have no obvious reason for doing so. The burden in 
passing their check is currently acceptable, but if they made it 
substantially harder, I would go somewhere else.


-- David Lubkin.