[Python-Dev] Summary of Tracker Issues (original) (raw)

Josiah Carlson jcarlson at uci.edu
Sun May 20 10:32:32 CEST 2007

Talin <talin at acm.org> wrote:

Josiah Carlson wrote: > Captchas like this are easily broken using computational methods, or > even the porn site trick that was already mentioned. Never mind > Stephen's stated belief, that you quoted, that he believes that even the > hard captchas are going to be beaten by computational methods soon. Please > try to pay attention to previous posts.

I think people are trying too hard here - in other words, they are putting more of computational science brainpower into the problem than it really merits. While it is true that there is an arms race between creators of social software applications and spammers, this arms race is only waged the largest scales - spammers simply won't spend the effort to go after individual sites, its not cost effective, especially when there are much more lucrative targets.

My point was that spending time to come up with a "better" captcha in attempt to thwart spammers was ill advised, in particular because others brought up varous reasons why captchas weren't the way to go.

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