Digital Analogue

The spam arms race

You might have noticed that there's been a recent increase in spam getting through. I was a little worried, but a scan of the logs seemed to indicate that these spams were just as random as all the squillions that didn't get through. Then I noticed: all of them had gotten the "future/past" question. And it turns out that those were judged correct if the correct answer appeared anywhere in the response—which "past" in particular did, since the bots tend to just enter one of their spammy posts into that field.

So there's a new version of BotBlock up, the first in two and a half years, that fixes that. Dunno if anyone else uses it, but it's still the best tool I've seen in the escalating arms race on spam (though I do know it's a little buggy and occasionally rejects correct answers... sorry about that. Just try again!).

"Computer science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes." --Edsger W. Dijkstra