Life is grand

a new form of spam that’s been popping up: image spam. The content of the spammer’s message is contained within an image to get by content filters. In response, spam-filtering companies are starting to use OCRs to detect words in images. And, in response to that response, spammers begin to distort images slightly so that they can’t be read accurately by OCR software.

Another War We’re Not Winning: Us vs Spam from O’Reilly Radar.

That is ironic. Many sites are implementing CAPTCHAs on registration and comment forms to block bots. They distort the image to stop bots with OCR from reading the image.

Tangential to this spammers come along and what do they do? They send us image spam which we try to use OCR to catch to which they reply by distorting the images.

Could our anti-spam systems advance OCR technology and so inadvertently allow bots to get through CAPTCHA?

Before the internet there were just two inevitabilities; death and taxes.

Now we have a third; spam.

Le Grand Content

Just a quick one; If I get an email from you of a marketing nature that does not have an unsubscribe link in it then I am going to hit Report Spam in GMail. Even if I have signed up for that email months ago.

Telling me to go back to your site and use login credentials I have long forgotten to uncheck 15 checkboxes to stop receiving emails from you is also not OK.

Having recently been hit by spam bots on this site and finding the automated solutions to be ineffective it struck me that a Comment Turk is in order. This would be a system that makes use of human comment moderation, farming it out through Amazon’s Mechanical Turk.

Plugins could easily be built for WordPress, Movable Type, Blogger et al which submit suspicious comments to a queue on Mechanical Turk. People can then come along and approve or reject the comment, being paid a cent per moderation. With the reputation system on Mechanical Turk you could largely get around spammers gaming Comment Turk.

I just got some spam with an amazing subject line:

People who are sensible about love are incapable of it