Re: Researchers: Microsoft's CAPTCHAs Easy to Solve

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

________________________________________
From: Rich Kulawiec [rsk () gsp org]
Sent: Wednesday, April 16, 2008 7:42 AM
To: David Farber
Cc: Richard Forno; Fergie
Subject: Re: [IP] Researchers: Microsoft's CAPTCHAs Easy to Solve

Captchas were never a good idea: they are an effective barrier to
participation by anyone using a text-only web browser, which includes
the blind and other visually-impaired people, as well as anyone doing
so for security reasons.  (I've always considered it cruel that operations
have compensated for their severe lack of anti-spam expertise by
discriminating against people among those least likely to be spammers.)

They've been doomed from the start because at the same time that captchas
were being widely deployed, spammers/abusers were hijacking Windows systems
in enormous numbers.  They now control on the order of 100M such systems,
and one recent estimate (Rick Wesson of Support Intelligence) has been
roughly triple that.   We've know for years that they have installed
sophisticated distributed processing operations on that system base;
it was only a matter of time until they put it to work doing mass
cracking of captchas.  (And of course, as the article mentions, they've
always had the option of employing minimum-cost labor anywhere in the
world with adequate connectivity.)

Captchas are just the latest in a long line of failed "anti-spam
solutions" that were known to be failures before they were even deployed.
This is, unfortunately, unlikely to stop widespread deployment of the
next pre-defeated tactic.

---Rsk

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