Thursday, February 21, 2008

Watch out for spam comments

My post before last garnered my first spam comment. I deleted it after the link in the 'name' took me to a site that my browser said was possibly harmful to my computer. Not a great sign.

It's interesting because in order to get a comment on this blog you need to enter a security code - the one where you get a set of garbled looking numbers and letters and have to enter them into a box.

This type of code is intended to check if you are indeed human. Machines have a hard time deciphering garbled letters. Humans find this task pretty easy.

I've heard of computer systems that trawl the internet looking for ways to post spam and when they encounter a garbled-message (such as the one used for this blog's security), they redirect the request to a human. The human process it and gets a small fee for their efforts.

Maybe the Matrix is real? I wonder how deep the rabbit hole goes?

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2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I hear you on this one! Just like virus', why do people do it?

I find the jumbled letters sometimes hard to decipher. What I really enjoy is when the verification is a string of 27 letters and numbers that are case sensitive.

Paul Soldera said...

I know what you mean, I am constantly getting them wrong as well! Which is why I was struck that a spam comment was left! There is a human somewhere helping a computer out.