I got a NEW beef …Technology

Technology is a motherfucker!
No sooner do you get nice and comfy with your latest online toy and some asshole figures out how to hijack it and trash you space with spam .

I always wondered if this actually works! My feeling is if I got a SPAM offer with a product that would make me drop 10 lb, grow my winky 4 inches and give me the wining lotto number for the next MEGA million draw I would just delete the thing.. Do people STILL fall for this shit? And if they do, shouldn’t their web surfing privileges be revoked?

Anyway.. Three days after KILLCASTRO went up as a blog, we started getting swamped with SPAM . The solution was to turn on the Blogger “verification”
Feature.

Now, who the FUCK came up with this bit of business?

Unless the verification mumbo jumbo is like – at the most-4 letters I NEVER hit it right. I am DYSLEXIC for Christ’s sake! So I think that even LEGALLY this may be a case of discrimination to a particular handicap. Lucky for BLOGGER I am not the litigious type ( and I also hate lawyers)

It is down right counter intuitive

Yeah I know, if it was any easier easier ( like having a REAL word being displayed ) then the spammers will figure it out.

How? I asked myself. Well it APPEARS that the spammers would OCR the graphic and get the verification word from there.

Well to do this requires one hell of a hacking utility.

Let’s look at the sequence:
1) Grab the graphic from the screen
2) Save the graphic to the SPAMER’S system
3) Put the graphic through an OCR (Optical Character Recognition)
4) Get the word
5) Send the word back
6) Press the POST button.

I think that only the MOST determined spammers with the most amount of time and resources can actually do this. But this ridiculous “verification” system was some asshole’s brainchild and the industry is just too lazy to go back and re-think the utter stupidity of this system.

Off the top of my head I can think of about 10 ways this can be improved.

1) Have 5 graphics and only one has a REAL word in it. Randomize where the real word appears. BOOM, now the possibilities OCRing the right one decrease by 400 fold.

2) Have picture of THINGS that can NOT be OCRed
3 lions , 4 ducks , 1 dog , 1 swing , 6 boys, 3 girls. Whatever

Then the answer would be
The number of items and what the items are
i.e. :3 cats

The back end software can parse the answer and grab the gist of it.
So if we show 4 lions and the answer contains the number 4 and the word lion (singular) is a good answer.

To be fair BLOGGER’S “validation” is not the worse I have seen. I have been at sites where all you get is a BLOB of nothing and that goes on for 5 or 6 times until you just go .”Oh fuck THIS; I have better things to do with MY time”

Making this validation thing a little bit friendlier not only helps the end user but helps increase the site’s overall traffic

So ENGINEERS of the web world.. GET OFF YOUR ASSES and figure something that is not such a cumbersome piece of lazy problem solving.

But, I guess EVERYONE is waiting for Bill Gates and the boys to come up with it, and give t to the public domain. That surely gives you a lot more time to hack away at your Linux box, and post Anti Microsoft slogans on hacker’s sites.