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Re: [Asrg] Passive Spam Revocation

Rich Kulawiec <rsk@gsp.org> Mon, 26 October 2009 21:27 UTC

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Date: Mon, 26 Oct 2009 17:27:41 -0400
From: Rich Kulawiec <rsk@gsp.org>
To: Anti-Spam Research Group - IRTF <asrg@irtf.org>
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Subject: Re: [Asrg] Passive Spam Revocation
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On Mon, Oct 26, 2009 at 03:26:40PM +0200, Pars Mutaf wrote:
> What if the CAPTCHA needs to be solved before the status can be seen?
> That would work?

Nope.  (Let me pause to note that there are a number of other problems
with this idea as well, I just didn't articulate those.)

The gap between "captcha which is difficult enough to defeat a program"
and "captcha which is easy enough to be solved by a human" has already
closed -- and even if it hadn't, spammers have numerous other techniques
available to them that scale reasonably well, including (a) captcha
replay and (b) mass cheap labor.  So I think it's reasonable that if
it becomes advantageous to spammers to solve captchas en masse, they will.

---Rsk

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