Dangerous Ideas

KittenAuth is a really clever idea to filter out spambots. Ars Technica has an article with photos of the method. Spambots in recent times have gotten really good at figuring out the obscured letters-and-numbers tests that a lot of services (e.g. Yahoo!) use to determine whether human beings are at the other end or not.

I heard about some spambots that did the clever (and insiduous) thing of filling out these forms by tricking humans into figuring out their tests for them. They did this by offering porn or something for free, but only for people who passed a test which was copied from the site they’re trying to set up spamming from. Of course, that’d be a lot of trouble to go through for every blog they’d want to spam, so this might be a pretty good tool to stop blog spam.

Jen