Tuesday, October 30, 2007

The captchas are here

Some months ago I wondered whether captchas -- those annoying word-image verification systems that so many blogs use -- are really necessary. Well, now I know.

One of my recent, and rather widely linked, posts has attracted a huge amount of automated spam, linking to what seems to be a nasty spyware-purveying site. I have deleted perhaps 10 copies so far, but more keep coming in.

So, hello captchas, sorry commenters.

2 comments:

Subhasis Chattopadhyay said...

well I being a 0 techie, read this one avidly. Liked the conciseness and the content...keep up the good work...

Anonymous said...

Hi Rahul

Got here through Nanopolitan.

You should probably watch the talk of the Captcha co-inventor - Louis Von Ahn.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8246463980976635143&q=luis+von+ahn&pr=goog-sl

His homepage you will find other 'games' he has designed to harness human computation power.

http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~biglou/