Saturday, April 27, 2013

Captcha, WTF?

Why the hell is it that most captcha systems display the real word in a legible font and render the nonsense word difficult to decipher? Have the 'bots gotten good enough to puzzle out a real word written out in a jacked-up font? Personally, even though the spambots are annoying as hell, I'd rather make it easy for the commentariat, and there's something cathartic about deleting fifty spam comments in one fell swoop.

Wow, what a perfunctory post... earlier in the day, it was too gorgeous outside to spend a lot of time online, and this evening, the radio has been playing such a good selection of music, I pretty much neglected looking up any topics to tackle for a more substantial post. Anyway, one particular song which stuck out was recent release Echo My Love by Omaha, Nebraska based Tilly and the Wall.





Now, if you don't mind, I'm going to go back to slacking off.

11 comments:

Anonymous said...
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Smut Clyde said...

HA HA first comment is from a spambot.

Why the hell is it that most captcha systems display the real word in a legible font and render the nonsense word difficult to decipher?

The "real word" is your contribution to crowd-sourced document digitisation. The commentariat are collectively cheaper than OCR.

John Coulthart put up an entertaining post the other day about spam templates and accidental poetry:
http://www.johncoulthart.com/feuilleton/2013/04/25/behold-the-spam/

Smut Clyde said...

Also, I think you mean "swell foop".

mikey said...

I don't honestly think we have enough information to make a quantitative judgement of Mr. Bastards Foop. It might very well BE swell, but it also may only be nifty. It could be the cats pajamas, or any number of other domesticated animals sleepwear, and it might even be outtasight.

We're going to need satellite photos...

anne said...

note to self , come back to read .. after ..day sway .. .

ifthethunderdontgetya™³²®© said...

Perhaps relevant.

Perhaps not.
~

anne said...

note to self - must come back to take a closer look at if.. . 's link, the soc ks

John Going Gently said...

What's a spambot?

Big Bad Bald Bastard said...

John Coulthart put up an entertaining post the other day about spam templates and accidental poetry:

There are some spam comments I plan on copying for a blog post, because they are hilarious. Most are boring, though.

Also, I think you mean "swell foop".

Nah, I had that treated with antibiotics.

We're going to need satellite photos...

Google Foop is a decent app.

note to self , come back to read .. after ..day sway .

It's good to have you back, anne.

Perhaps relevant.
Perhaps not


That's great, you can wear it so you can sneak up on orbs to take close-up pictures.

note to self - must come back to take a closer look at if.. . 's link, the soc ks

I think you'd make a splendid ninja, anne.

What's a spambot?

I turned off the "word verification" system which filters out "spam" comments, so readers would have an easier time posting comments. Every once in a while, I get a bunch of automated advertisements, usually for pharmaceuticals, posted as comments. Since it's an automated program, often originating overseas, the grammar and spelling are often hilariously atrocious.

mikey said...

Actually, the spelling and grammar used in blog spam are usually intentional, designed to avoid the parsers that anti-spam tools use to identify suspect posts. They try to take advantage of the fact that humans can read things even if the characters, words and spacing are all messed up, but machines are mostly doing pattern matching, which will fail.

/Geeksplaining Voice

Ask Smut - he knows the scientific terms...

Big Bad Bald Bastard said...

Actually, the spelling and grammar used in blog spam are usually intentional, designed to avoid the parsers that anti-spam tools use to identify suspect posts.

These seem more like "Engrish", phrases such as "Thanks fοг shaгіng such a fastidious thinkіng, post is fastidious"