[Python-Dev] Summary of Tracker Issues

[Josiah Carlson]

Talin <talin at acm.org> wrote:
> Josiah Carlson wrote:
> > Captchas like this are easily broken using computational methods, or
> > even the porn site trick that was already mentioned.  Never mind
> > Stephen's stated belief, that you quoted, that he believes that even the
> > hard captchas are going to be beaten by computational methods soon.  Please
> > try to pay attention to previous posts.
> 
> I think people are trying too hard here - in other words, they are 
> putting more of computational science brainpower into the problem than 
> it really merits. While it is true that there is an arms race between 
> creators of social software applications and spammers, this arms race is 
> only waged the largest scales - spammers simply won't spend the effort 
> to go after individual sites, its not cost effective, especially when 
> there are much more lucrative targets.

My point was that spending time to come up with a "better" captcha in
attempt to thwart spammers was ill advised, in particular because others
brought up varous reasons why captchas weren't the way to go.


 - Josiah