Porn Rewards Users To Get Past Anti-Spam Captchas

Stalke writes "Spammers are now usings a new technique to circumvent the 'captchas,' the distorted text in graphics, that users must input to receive the free email account. The spammers have cracked the system by displaying the 'captchas' on free porn sites in real time. Since there are always a large number of people signing up for free porn, they do the work of decripting the 'captchas' which is then replayed back into the spammers program to create a new email account. Who thought that porn could be a hacking technique!" Sure sounds plausible, though the link here says only "someone told me."

I am not looking at porn

[hetairoi]

I'm hacking ..... now go away, what I'm doing in here is private.

Nifty

[turbofisk]

I'm not for spamming... But if I were a spammer... I would pat myself on my back... Pretty nifty... Bastards!

Re:Easy fix

[Cyno01]

Stay away from porn? You're new here, right?

Proof!

[RiscIt]

Proof once again that porn (and it's usually associated activities... ahem) will NOT make you go blind!

Re:Easy fix

[millahtime]

"Stay away from porn and you don't have to worry about this way of spammers getting your email address."

Yeah, like that is really going to happen. The internet would crash if that happened. So many internet accouts would be caneceled that ISPs would go out of business. It would be the doom of the internet.

good or evil

[nizo]

Now if we could only get spammers to use their ingenuity for good rather than evil, we could solve all of the worlds problems.

Re:Foundation

[krumms]

It has more uses then we can even imagine.

And several uses that we just don't WANT to imagine :P

Easy fix.

[Black Parrot]

For your captcha, use a picture of a really ugly old woman with "click here to see more" written across it, and no one visiting a porn site will help with the decryption.

Re:Spam spam spam spam SPAAM!

[Anonymous Coward]

If you don't know where to get your porn without "solving" captchas, you're hardly Slashdot material.

I've heard of it too

[Maskirovka]

They like to call the method called "many carrots and more sticks".

In related news...

[Black Parrot]

A million new Slashdot accounts were added today.

Re:Proof!

[Scarblac]

Oh yeah? So why do they do it only at the signup page?

Human Grid Computing?!

[lunar_legacy]

Sounds like distributed computing systems. Hmmmm.....maybe we can use this in...yeah that's it!!

It really is true

[The Night Watchman]

Someone told me once that most technologies that have become successful are those technologies that assist in the dissemination of porn and/or voyeurism. Thinking about it, that's very true. Radio gave way quickly to television, which gave way to cable, and BAM! You get porn. Radio also gave way to the telephone, which gave way to party lines, and BAM! Advances in optics have brought us photography (BAM!), telescopes (BAM!), and eyeglasses (the... the porn is so CLEAR now!), to name a few. Look at the primary achievement of the 90s. The commercialization of the Internet. That's essentially a porn revolution!

So porn is being used to break encryption. Personally, I feel there can be no other way. Porn will lead us to the greatest achievements of our day, and conversely, all roads lead to porn.

It's our past, our present, and our future. Embrace it, or be left behind.

Re:Spam spam spam spam SPAAM!

[routerwhore]

I'm sorry, you incorrectly assumed you had two hands free in this exercise to make your point. I believe one of those would be occupied...

Re:Sounds like rubbish

[ellisDtrails]

It would not be that hard to use server-side HTTP requests with a scripting language like PHP or "compiled" language like C#/.NET and a Message Queue to accomplish this. Hey, maybe I'll write one of these I am sure the porn people pay more than my shitty company. ellis

Re:Easy fix.

[chiller2]

Margaret Thatcher naked on a cold day!
Margaret Thatcher naked on a cold day!

(Austin Powers reference)

Holy crap

[osgeek]

They've harnessed the power of horniness, but for evil. If only that unlimited power could be harnessed for good -- it would be like having controlable fusion and all of the heavy water we'd ever need.

Amazingly clever, those evil spamming bastards.

Re:Foundation

[Gogl]

"Porn, the foundation of the internet. It will never go away or die. It has more uses then we can even imagine."

Agreed. It is an energy field created by all living things. It surrounds us, penetrates us, and binds the galaxy together.

Hrmm...

Re:Foundation

[cartzworth]

More like BLINDs the galaxy together.

Someone asked for a real example of this...

[johnthorensen]

Well I don't have an example of the page, but I do happen to have one of the captcha tests they were using... :)

Click here to decode pr0n captcha [fastsilicon.com]

-JT

Re:Valid News Sources

[andih8u]

I'm sure this is the kind of front page stuff that BBC and Reuters would be reporting.

"This just in...spammers are apparently using pron sites to help decrypt captchas."

Some nuts will find a conspiracy in everything.

"I would pat myself on my back"

[Anonymous Coward]

I would pat myself on my back

I doubt it's the back...

Re:Valid News Sources

[ZoneGray]

I dunno, I think rumors are as valid a news source as Reuters or the BBC. In my experience, the accuracy rate seems to be about the same.

Who registers for porn?

[ClosedGL]

I've never understood people that pay or subscribe for porn. There is simply no need. The air outside isn't really that dirty. The creepy crawlies will not bite you. You cannot get infected by talking to other people. Girls don't generally mind any of the Linux t-shirt (apart from the "I WANT TO ROOT YOU" shirts, but then, that is a scary thought). I appreciate the hands-on people of the world *arf*, but if you're the stereotypical geek who's girlfriend's surname is MPG, try looking around, it really isn't hard to find. I'd list some sites to check first, but I'm not ready for the 'Informative' score! Obviously, I've never looked for porn before, I'm just assuming...

Re:Holy crap

[fuzzybunny]

Well, no, you're missing the point--the people who would be generating all the energy from porn, let's just say that part of the reason this happens is that "fusion" doesn't enter anywhere into the picture.

And as for "heavy water", well, it may be heavy and liquid, but water it ain't...

Re:Foundation

[dmayle]

It had to be said...

Imagine a beowulf cluster of porn viewers.

(Which is basically what this is)

The feeder bar approach

[ericspinder]

Do a little work, get a little porn.

"Hey, I'm only seeing ugly people having sex!, guess I have to step up the quality of my work"

Re:Foundation

[chaoticset]

"Porn...is there anything it can't do?"

Sorry.

It's really true, I've seen them

[mst76]

Yes, I've hundreds of seen these 'captchas' in the last weeks when I was surfing, ..., uhm, ah, well, never mind.

Sounds patentable

[jmcharry]

I wonder if they have filed for a patent?

The Meatrixator

[Doc Ruby]

This brilliant design is the frontier of human/computer interaction. It creates a P2P network of human brains to crack an intractibly compute-intensive problem. We are now in the nascent Matrix, as it feeds off our organic energy. It's only a matter of time before CaptchaNet becomes selfaware. At least it has a use for us - we'll make great pets.

Outsourcing

[Anonymous Coward]

I expect that soon all porn viewing jobs will be outsourced to India.

Re:Foundation

[Dyolf Knip]

It surrounds us, penetrates us, and binds the galaxy together.

Well, one out of three ain't bad.

by analogy

[Anonymous Coward]

Using porn as a motivation drive to do work...

So basically it's a Wanker Rotary Engine?

distributed.net for human brains

[Sloppy]

Using the 'net to harness human cognition instead of computers' clock cycles? I am impressed.

Hmm.. this could open a new world for Open Source

[donutello]

We can work around IBMs patent if we come up with a way to pay Open Source developers with porn.

Submit a patch and you'll be rewarded with 5 minutes of unlimited access.

So, the people are being used as coprocessors?

[Phat_Tony]

So, the computer has a task the CPU is poor at performing, so they offload that procedure to specialized "wetware" that's more efficient at handling that kind of processing. The people are being used like FPU's or GPU's. Paid in porn, instead of run on electricity.

How'd you like to have a job as a coprocessor? Is this the computer-age version of dehumanizing assembly line drones- soon people will sit in front of computers all day long handling the offloaded processing tasks computers are poor at handling?

Come to think of it, this is already going on a lot. Computers process all the transactions at most companies, but they have certain "flags" they catch that offload certain transactions-ones that are exceptional for some reason (complex, may involve fraud, etc)- for people to handle personally. I just hadn't thought of people as coprocessing drones handeling certain exceptions a computer program comes across and offloads for biological processing.

The matrix won't happen all at once with a war. It will creep up on us so we hardly notice it. We won't be subjugated, we'll volunteer.

-Phat Tony