Spam Stopgap Extreme: New Version – Elliott Back:
I’ve just finished testing Spam Stopgap Extreme version 1.4. Special thanks to Matt Mullenweg, who cleaned up some things in a fork called WP Hashcash, C.S., who complained about code predictability, John F., who suggested that I not send google to spammers and include documentation, and Matt Warden who thought that logging should check for fopen and other file functions, which can often be disabled on the server.
With no further ado, I present Spam Stopgap Extreme v1.4. You can download the .zip and install it into your plugins directory, for improved spam protection today!
Is this possible? One recent comment suggests not, but one CS student at Cornell claims otherwise.
I found and removed close to 400 spams today (only three were posted) so I took a look at this problem again.
The holy grail/silver bullet seems to be the use of some kind of a Turing test to make this crummy activity harder or more expensive to automate: spam’s big appeal is that its costs approach zero, so any return is gravy. If some kind of non-trivial requirement for interaction (CAPTCHA graphics) can be introduced, it raises their costs and makes only unprotected sites vulnerable. As the number of vulnerable sites declines, and as the usual arms race rages — spammers find a loophole, the white hats find a new solution — perhaps it becomes unprofitable.
Now playing: Swing ’48 by Django Reinhardt from the album “Verve Jazz Masters 38: Django Reinhardt”