
How CAPTCHA got trashed - The wiggly words are now most useful for malware authors - nickb
http://www.computerworld.com.au/index.php/id;489635775;fp;;fpid;
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aasarava
It's interesting to hear that some parts of Craigslist are 90% spam now. You'd
think that under a traditional parasite-host model, the spammers wouldn't want
to completely kill off the message boards / classified sections where they
direct their attacks. Once the users are gone from what was once a useful part
of the Web, no amount of spam there is going to yield any results.

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bdr
From the spammers' perspective, it's a "tragedy of the commons" situation. To
each individual spammer, it is worthwhile to keep posting on craigslist for
the short-term even if the sum of their actions is suboptimal in the long-
term.

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mynameishere
A prediction: You know what will replace CAPTCHAs? A credit card number.
That's right. Sending an email will cost 1/100th of a penny. A craiglist
posting will cost 1/10th of a penny, etc, etc. Someone just needs to make it
work.

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ScottWhigham
Doesn't at least some part of you think, "If it was so easy, it would have
been done at some point in the past 15 years? There are all of these
absolutely brilliant minds working on this problem - why haven't they done
this before?"

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khafra
Microsoft tried to get micropayments rolling at least half a decade ago,
that's probably why there isn't a workable system in place yet.

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mleonhard
There isn't a workable system yet because each company tries to make something
proprietary. Micropayments will catch on when there's a simple protocol for
it, like SMTP is for email.

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s3graham
I guess the "Turing" part of the name was a bit hopeful. Are the attacks
actually doing OCR, or are they brute-forced against a database somehow? (or
maybe those are the same thing these days?)

I guess anything that's widespread enough will make cracking it valuable
enough to get someone to work around it, but it seems like we could probably
come up with something that was quite a lot more human-y requiring?

Language understanding? Whatever it is that AI PHD students are failing to
solve these days?

