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DeviousDeviousPosted Aug 24, 2006 3:30 UTC (Thu) by gjmarter (subscriber, #5777)Parent article: Fighting image spam
The spammers probably do not care if SpamAssassin can figure out how to OCR their images. If SA is successful enough, then they have a new tool to help them solve CAPTCHAs.
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Unexpected benefit? Posted Aug 24, 2006 6:41 UTC (Thu) by eru (subscriber, #2753) [Link] On the other hand, this arms race might help advance the state-of-the-art in free OCR software, which would be a good outcome...
Unexpected benefit? Posted Aug 24, 2006 7:17 UTC (Thu) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link] Hell ya.
High quality OCR software for open source software would rock. It would be usefull for a whole bunch of different things.
For example.. improved handwriting recognition, maybe? Increase accessability for disabled people would be another purpose. Make it easy and cheaper for people to scan in massive amounts of written and printed documents for archival purposes.
If they can get that improved then it would make the fight against spam much more worthwhile then just fighting spam. :)
Plus it would be great if SA is able to outwit the spammers with the aid super cow powers of open source. Because this would be simply something that is not possible with closed source software. The anti-virus vs the pro-virus people have proven time and time again that crafty folks on irc channels can defeat big corprate money.
Unexpected benefit? Posted Aug 24, 2006 9:45 UTC (Thu) by NAR (subscriber, #1313) [Link] but might help defeating some of the current defense strategies used against web forum spamming (i.e. put an image to the registrating page which is hard to detect by a computer but easier to detect by a user, and type the string on the image into a textfield)...
Unexpected benefit? Posted Aug 24, 2006 12:50 UTC (Thu) by eru (subscriber, #2753) [Link] You mean "captchas". One way to make OCR ineffective against them is to use pictures of something, instead of strings. For example, show photos of well-known people, buildings, or animal species and ask the person to type the name. For a bot to beat that, it would have to do sophisticated pattern-matching against a large library of pictures, making it infeasible for spammers.
Unexpected benefit? Posted Aug 24, 2006 16:13 UTC (Thu) by NAR (subscriber, #1313) [Link] I'm afraid it would be really hard to create a set of images that every user would recognize - after all, "well known" is a relative concept.
Unexpected benefit? Posted Aug 24, 2006 18:36 UTC (Thu) by mattdm (subscriber, #18) [Link] The other benefit would hopefully be that sites would stop using CAPTCHAs.
Devious Posted Aug 24, 2006 10:52 UTC (Thu) by robdinn (guest, #30753) [Link] I didn't know what a CAPTCHA was, but wikipedia came to the rescue:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Captchas
CAPTCHAs are easy to beat Posted Aug 26, 2006 4:58 UTC (Sat) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link] all it takes are pictures of naked females.
just setup a porn site and you can get a LOT of people willing to prove that they are human (by solving the CAPTCHAs that you harvest from the site you want to penetrate (and you probably have enough traffic that you can do this in real-time, you fetch the image from the target, present it to the next person to access the site, and use the result against your target)
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