Are You Human? Prove it!
There has been a dramatic increase in the volume of blog spam in recent weeks. I’ve seen colleagues from all around the world complaining about it, and many sites have added CAPTCHA logic to try to weed out the spam.
CAPTCHA stands for (roughly) “Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart,” and the concept is simply this: add a required step for posting on a blog that will identify whether the sender is a human or a computer program. For example, some sites (Tom’s comes to mind) display a few characters that are distorted in a way that prevents OCR software from reading them accurately, and you have to decipher the characters and then type them in. If you’re a human with a normally functioning brain, it’s not too hard to do, but the spam-bots can’t get past that step.
I started to install a CAPTCHA add-on on this blog a while back, but ran into some technical issues and never finished it up. And frankly, some days I’m glad I didn’t. The bastardized English in which many of the porn spam comments are written can sometimes provide a nice moment of amusement, and it doesn’t take more than a few seconds to scan a couple dozen new messages and mark them as spam.
But I’m thinking there’s an approach that I’d like to implement eventually, when technology like this is widely available. If I could install a filter like that, I think I’d be ready to turn the tables: instead of me being amused by randomly generated spam comments that nobody else sees, you could all be amused by randomly generated collections of photos that I never see.
Stay tuned, developers are surely working around the clock to serve this market …
This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 23rd, 2006 at 2:46 pm. You can subscribe to comments on this post through its RSS feed.
on August 23, 2006 at 3:57 pm Tom wrote:
WOW! This is great — in the past three days I’ve been reading and re-reading Alan Turing’s original writings on his test for intelligent machines. It’s fascinating, and not without humor. The logic is completely basic at every level, but builds to an incredibly intricate lattice of conditionals and overlapping programming-vs-intelligence confusion almost immediately. It’s quite interesting, really. I can’t believe this happens to come up now on your blog, too.
Jinx, buy me a Coke (and all that).
on August 23, 2006 at 4:09 pm Megan wrote:
Okay, I went to the site and I have an observation. For the women, it’s easy–I was human every time. But for the men, I kept getting die robot die. I had no idea which of the men were supposed to be hot! I didn’t see a single screen that included three men *I’d* call hot; the vast majority seemed neither hot nor conspicuously unhot.
So is the problem that I have bad taste? Or is it that female standards of beauty are more universally beaten into us in American culture? Or is it just that the guys (I assume it was guys) who put this together paid a lot more attention to the pictures of women.
My guess is a combination of the latter two, a little weighted toward the last. It looks like the creators went out of their way to ensure an obvious contrast between attractive and unattractive women, but just threw a bunch of guys together and said hey, let’s call some of these hot, because we have to.
Or maybe the “hot” guys are just the ones with shaved and oiled chests? Is that what they think women really go for?
on August 23, 2006 at 4:17 pm Megan wrote:
Now that I look at it more closely, I see they actually use the HOTorNOT API. Does that mean the pictures come from hotornot.com, too? Maybe they are using some empirical data for their hot designations, and I’m just out of touch with the common woman.
Or maybe most of the people rating men on hotornot.com are actually men.
on August 23, 2006 at 4:20 pm Doug wrote:
I’d say the latter. I mean, most of the people supporting all forms of titillation-for-sale are men, right? It’s probably the same on hotornot.com.
Perhaps, in the interest of political correctness, it could be modified to be “which of these puppies is cute?” or something like that.