Hmmm. I had noticed that spam comments on this blog had increased noticeably recently, roughly coinciding with Google's introduction of the new Captcha word verification system. Now I see why:
Google’s Blogger service, already one of the largest sources of spam blogs on the Web, is now being innundated with another wave of spammers following the cracking of the Google CAPTCHA system. This means that spammers can now fully automate the process of creating and setting up new Blogger spam blogs, making the process even faster and enabling the creation of more spam blogs than ever before.Source.
Yup, that sounds like it. In response to many negative comments, both directly to me and in other blogs, I am turning off word verification for a while. It's putting people off responding to blog posts, and since comments and debate are the whole pleasure and point of blogging in the first place, it is totally self-defeating.
I'll keep an eye on the spam. If it gets unmanageable, I will have to reinstate WV, but I am going to ride bareback for a while.
Please keep the comments coming. It's lonely here without the voices.
UPDATE: Thanks to eagle-eyed, square-jawed fighter ace Endemoniada_88, who spotted that the source referred to is from 2008. So the contents of this post may well be as per title, as per ushual.
Test
ReplyDeleteWorked.
ReplyDeleteAfter commenting yesterday I went ahead and took my captcha off too. So far no spam.
ReplyDeleteI figured that Blogger has made it easier to delete undesirable comments so it shouldn't be too bad in the event of spam.
Also I have it set up that I have to moderate comments on any post over 10 days old and that is where I usually catch the spam with the links in it.
"...I am turning off word verification for a while. It's putting people off responding to blog posts..."
ReplyDeleteDitto! I'll keep an eye on it using the 'recent comment' function, but if, as Longrider thinks, they are now using real people to spam, this new Turing word generator is a waste of time.
It's a great shame that the old anti-spam system has been taken down - the some of the faux words it made up to be typed in were just very appealing. It was a bit like those really nice plastic bottle that freshly squeezed orange juice comes in - it felt a real shame not to use them again for something.
ReplyDeleteAnd some were so "Freudian" in the context of the posting/response.
DeleteThank you Richard.
ReplyDeleteIf only all organisations were so responsive to "Customer Feedback".
I have to respond to my honoured readers, Joe. Without them, it would be like shouting in an empty house. Cathartic, but ultimately pointless. Glad you approve.
ReplyDeleteI have the 'moderate comments on posts older than 14 days' and find, like Trobairitz, that this captures the majority of spam. Just one this morning - so far, so good.
Thank you, WV kills me. And by the way, I know where you can get some cheap Viagra/replica watches...
ReplyDeleteJust kidding
Richard doesn't need Viagra.
DeleteAccording to his "Bearing Up" post yesterday, he already has something to make part of his anatomy "........throb and swell like something in a science fiction movie."
He's just trying to work out how to transfer its effects from his leg to elsewhere.
Richard - I got rid of WV as soon as they changed it and started getting hit with a lot more spam. I thought it was becasue I turned of WV but now I know.
ReplyDeleteSo far the spam block has stopped every spam message so I'm not too bothered.
I've had a lot of them in Russian too ??
I get a lot with some strange script in (Malay?), often to do with betting sites. I reckon Blogger's spam filter stops 2 in 3. However, see Endo's comment below about times and dates.
DeleteReCaptcha - not necessarly cracked, but certainly flawed. The source you link to is from 2008, so covers the previous generation of distorted-text challenge/response methods (which fell victim to improved OCR techniques). Rumours of ReCaptcha itself being broken only really go back to early 2011 and are still unconfirmed. Whether the algorithms are genuinely busted or not, though, the easiest way round it is simply to use sweatshop labour, as is becoming more prevalent with major spammers.
ReplyDeleteIn any case...it's something of a con. It exists as a side-project from library digitisation. Projects or individuals scan in printed/written material using OCR and submit unidentifiable words to reCaptcha. These are assumed to have been de facto proven illegible to machines. Each of these is then paired at random with a similarly-obtained word that has previously been identified by a human. If you correctly enter the "known" word, it is assumed that you have also correctly entered the "unknown" one. It stays "unknown" until a few corroborating responses have been received, then gets flagged into the "known" category and can be used to pattern-match in the original scanning project, as well as being reused as a "known" reCaptcha.
So, not only are you contributing your efforts to doing someone else's leg-work (which you might not mind, but it's nice if you know that in advance), but your site only gets the benefit of 50% of the apparent validation and - as an added bonus - you can be presented with pretty much any old crap in any language depending on what the original submitter was trying to scan.
@JuliaM - Anti-Turing generator, surely? A machine-set test to identify humans rather a human-set test to identify machines...
Good spot on the date - I hadn't seen that. Confirmation bias, I suppose. Thanks for that explanation of how the captcha thing works. Very clever, although I still preferred the older version with the wavy text.
DeleteMaybe the new system hasn't been cracked and the increase in spam is a coincidence, although it looks like it's a coincidence for Bucko too.
I'm going to leave the WV off for a while in any case. I like to live dangerously.
Spot-on! I have heard the same thing and am starting to see it on one of my blogs. On top of that, Captcha is utterly frustrating when one wants to make comments on another blog, as the words are all hidden and frequently have to type the darn code 3-4 times before getting it right. So, to summarize: Captcha is great for spammers, and frustrating for legitimate comment writers and bloggers. This was great of you to point this all out - now I know its not just me!
ReplyDelete