It's all in your head, Part 3
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bert_the_turtle
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bert_the_turtle
- level5
- Posts: 4795
- Joined: Fri Oct 13, 2006 6:11 pm
- Location: Cologne
- Contact:
elexis wrote:Also: I would like to take a moment to bring up the subject of locking certain old topics....
As already mentioned, it really isn't that big of an issue to go to the effort of locking old topics. How often does it happen? Once? Twice a month? Not exactly unmanageable. It makes more sense preventing bots posting through better CAPTCHAs than it does locking topics which would just annoy people who wanted to make legitimate responses.
elexis wrote:Times have changed... Would there be a real person getting past the CAPTCHA for the bot or it the bot particularly smart?
There are basically 3 methods for a bot to get past CAPTCHAs:
- Decipher the CAPTCHA, either through having a catalogue of the site's CAPTCHAs and/or some form of character/image recognition.
- Exploit a bug, i.e. find a bug in a common CAPTCHA system or common mistake people make in homebrew CAPTCHAs and search the internet for places which use it.
- The bot feeds the CAPTCHA back to a human such as the spammer, or a random person via a high traffic website.
In times of old, bots were normally aided by the spammer as recognition techniques were relatively slow, inaccurate and expensive. Nowadays they are mainly recognition based as people have access to more processing power and better public domain recognition techniques from years of research. Although, with the spread of systems like reCAPTCHA, which constantly have new words that couldn't be recognised through OCR techniques added to its database, there may well be an increase in human interaction with the bots over time. Particularly as more and more people gain internet access it will be easier for spammers to create reasonably high traffic porn sites to palm the verification off to. As it stands however, many places still use relatively vulnerable systems so many spammers will be happy with their off-the-shelf recognition bot, but it's hard to say for sure due to the difficulty in gathering solid statistics.
Re: It's all in your head, Part 3
Chris wrote: Now that storage space is no longer an issue Procedural generation has become something of a lost art, but I believe it is the secret weapon that most developers have yet to (re)discover.
How I wish I would know that secret weapon you've mean...
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cold steel
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