Pluss with those of us with failing site captchas are anoying if we don't have a pair of eyes to deal with it.
SA&G ----- Original Message ----- From: "Stephen J. Turnbull" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: "Jeffrey Goldberg" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Cc: "Mailman Users" <[email protected]>; "Matt Domsch" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Sunday, January 06, 2008 5:01 PM Subject: Re: [Mailman-Users] bots subscribing to lists via web formsto avoidmember-only restrictions Jeffrey Goldberg writes: > On the whole, I have found these things so rare that it hasn't been a > real problem. However, in principle lists could easily be targeted, > so it is worth considering captchas. Captchas have been discussed, and were not considered worthwhile. (1) There are many sites that describe algorithms for automatically getting 50% or better recognition on many common captchas. I've tried a couple using the Gimp, and indeed it looks like it's pretty easy to achieve a filter that gives OCR-able images. Note that a 50% rate is going to be good enough for any spammer if that gives access. (2) Several dodges have been found to get human help for solving captchas (sort of XSS attacks in reverse), and of course you can just hire them. (3) On the other hand, hard to read captchas are exactly that: hard to read. For humans, too. So introducing captchas the score is Spammers 2, Humans 0. ------------------------------------------------------ Mailman-Users mailing list [email protected] http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/mailman-users Mailman FAQ: http://www.python.org/cgi-bin/faqw-mm.py Searchable Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/mailman-users%40python.org/ Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/mailman-users/marrie12%40gmail.com Security Policy: http://www.python.org/cgi-bin/faqw-mm.py?req=show&file=faq01.027.htp ------------------------------------------------------ Mailman-Users mailing list [email protected] http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/mailman-users Mailman FAQ: http://www.python.org/cgi-bin/faqw-mm.py Searchable Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/mailman-users%40python.org/ Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/mailman-users/archive%40jab.org Security Policy: http://www.python.org/cgi-bin/faqw-mm.py?req=show&file=faq01.027.htp
