Cats against spam

Might as well start the week with something a little different. A lot of spam gets sent from free webmail accounts, with spam software setting up masses of temporary accounts to mail spam from.

At least it used to be like that, until the email address providers started using "Human Interactive Proofs" on their sign-up forms. Those are the crazy letters you have to type in to confirm you are a human being and get the account activated.

Unfortunately, spammers being the devious folk they are, it seems some spam bots can "read" the letters and bypass the check.

One suggested alternative is to show new account signups a picture and ask them to identify the subject before accepting the application. A spam program can't recognize a cat, but a human can. Or so says Microsoft's Kevin Larson.

More on email address providers | Tags: spam, anti-spam

Permalink | August 06, 2007 | 0 comment(s)
Get posts like this: as an RSS feed | biweekly email | via Twitter

0 Comments:

Comments closed for this post