Captchas work, right?

I can’t remember the first place I saw (and filled in) a captcha. They’re so ubiquitous now that it’s almost impossible to leave a comment or sign up for something without trying to read squiggly little letters and numbers in an image box.

But they’re not going to solve the spam problem. The New York Times (again, I know) has an article about captchas in the Business section, on how captchas are being broken by computer subroutines (and those programs being sold to spammers for $1,000).

And long before now, creative spammers figured out they could re-route captcha images to free porn sites, requiring horny net surfers to fill in a captcha which could then be routed right back–all by computer–to the site that was meant to be for humans only.

Now the big boys like PayPal and MySpace are working on developing systems that ask for true image recognition (is this a vegetable?) - something that is still notoriously hard for computers. It won’t last forever, of course. In fact my favorite quote from the piece is fairly apt:

“No single defensive technology is forever. If they were, we would all be living in fortified castles with moats.”

So far, the best spam-catching experience I’ve had is with Akisment, which now comes standard with Wordpress installs, and it is indispensable to me.

Ideally, young upstart programmers would stop coding $1,000 programs that crack through anti-spam systems. But that’s not very likely, so I guess it’s time to grab my shovel and start digging a moat.