interesting

This is so cool!

I feel bad for admiring what the spammers did here, but it's really very clever and ingenious. Basically, spam bots were signing up for hundreds of free email accounts on sites like yahoo. So yahoo put in CAPTCHAs, otherwise known as those warped images of letters and numbers that are fairly easy for a human to read, but very hard for a computer to read. Clever way of sorting out the people from the computers, right? Now, presumably this solution wouldn't have worked forever, because it has to be possible to train a computer to become as good at recognizing those images as people are. But we're still pretty far from making that happen.

So what do spammers do in the mean time? They figure out how to get humans to do the dirty work for them. The brilliant stroke? use porn. You download a trojan onto your computer (likely by viewing porn in the first place), and it creates a pop-up ad of a woman who takes off an article of clothing for each CAPTCHA you solve. genius.

p.s. once you type the word porn, somehow all the other words around it seem dirtier: "dirty work" "stroke" "trojan" "pop-up" ...you get the idea.