This one time, at band camp, Adam Kennedy wrote: > It's only a matter of time till the image spam is sophisticated enough > to existing OCR software, even fuzzy OCR, is going to start getting in > trouble.
Exactly. If the spammers can't get around Captchas[1], then our software likely won't be any better. > Frankly, I think 90% of the anti-spam techniques I here about are pretty > horrendous. > > They generally rely on the argument "Well the spammer don't $something, > so we use a method that stops anything that doesn't $something". Yes but they actually work, and continue working for a long time. Postgrey is still happily rejecting loads of spam for me. Rejecting numeric IP-only HELO strings still rejects hundreds of potential spams a day for me. For a long time, it seemed like the spammers were all 1337 Visual Basic haxx0rs without the ability to read an RFC or react to countermeasures. Some are clearly getting a lot better at writing their malware, which probably has a lot to do with the amount of money now being made from the scams they're running. I think for a long time there were few suppliers of spam senders, and they weren't very good. This was okay for the spammers because until spam started getting really ridiulous, the kinds of people who would fall for it weren't filtering. Now that ISP filters are reasonably good by default, the spammers are having to get better. > These methods all have a limited lifespan, because all that needs to > happen is that the spammers start doing $something, and the anti-spam is > defeated. As I said, they continue to work for a very long time. Don't forget there's still a buttload of MyDoom and the like machines out there! [1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Captcha > -- > SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ > Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html -- Rev Simon Rumble <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> www.rumble.net Inflation is the one form of taxation that can be imposed without legislation. - Milton Friedman -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
