The ultimate captcha

Finally the antispam industry came up with something working, instead of creating an unreadable image with words that go all over the place, create something that only humans can recognize. The most famous example are "The Rapidshare cats". A poll on our homepage showed about 80% hated them, but they have no idea what poor RapidShare is going through with the captcha crackers.

A common question is "why not just add two pictures, cat and dog, and make the human user select which one?". Well, the answer is simple: if spammers have a success rate over 5%, they consider it to being profitable. So, that's why they combined it with the old textbased captcha.

Personally, I believe the idea is awesome, but the realisation could have been done better and as usual: less annoying for the end user. Maybe they should try to implement some sort of rotating system showing different types of captcha's all the time?

IM spam?

Seems like they cracked the Hotmail captcha, or they hired a hell lot of Chinese people to register accounts for spamming purposes, but it sure is annoying.

I can imagine this will be a huge success for the spammers, because of the personal approach style, much more than e-mail spam I guess.

Spam has been stopped

Remember my post about stopping comment spammers with Javascript? It has proven to be a very reliable method as long as you make sure to change the data that is generated with Javascript from site to site. A little example of only today from "spam that didn't quite make it":

[root@rbox /]# cat /var/log/randombase.com.log|grep "POST /news"
87.255.64.233 - - [19/Apr/2008:01:18:31 -0500] "POST /news/33 HTTP/1.1" 200 8922 "-" "-"
87.255.64.233 - - [19/Apr/2008:01:18:35 -0500] "POST /news/33 HTTP/1.1" 200 8922 "-" "-"
83.247.31.93 - - [19/Apr/2008:02:12:29 -0500] "POST /news/33 HTTP/1.0" 200 8811 "-" "-"
83.247.31.93 - - [19/Apr/2008:02:12:31 -0500] "POST /news/33 HTTP/1.0" 200 8811 "-" "-"
85.232.230.225 - - [19/Apr/2008:03:10:46 -0500] "POST /news/33 HTTP/1.1" 200 8924 "-" "-"
85.232.230.225 - - [19/Apr/2008:03:10:48 -0500] "POST /news/33 HTTP/1.1" 200 8924 "-" "-"

In this case it is clear they tried to spam us, no useragent nor referer set.