Re: Captchas was Re: ISP wants to stop outgoing web based spam

[Paul Jakma <paul () clubi ie>]

On Thu, 10 Aug 2006, Simon Waters wrote:

> I've no doubt some captcha can be invented in ASCII, but this isn't 
> it.

'tis. It works for at least one blog platform, where I've never once 
had comment spam.

> a kid), and it would be relatively trivial to code it to handle the 
> types of questions for this kind of test.

Sure, so change the questions.

The ultimate "captcha defeating AI" is already in-use by spammers by 
the way - humans (get humans to "solve" captchas in return for some 
reward, e.g. porn). ASCII or image matters not a jot to those.

ASCII captches are no less effective than image-captcha just without 
the nasty "ban the blind from the internet!" side-effects.

regards,
--
Paul Jakma      paul () clubi ie        paul () jakma org       Key ID: 64A2FF6A
Fortune:
byob, v:
        Believing Your Own Bull