I’ve now upgraded the CAPTCHA solution on this site. This version should be quite hard to break with current OCR software. Let me know what you think of it.
I’m getting to my breaking point with spam. My blog gets a couple dozen spam comments a week, and in the last week, my email box was averaging more than a hundred spam messages every couple days. I’ve decided that it is time to take action.
Starting today, commenters on this blog need to pass a reverse turing test (sometimes referred to as a CAPTCHA, or a Computer Administered Program to Tell Computers and Humans Apart). I suspect that the current method I’m using can be broken quite easily with modern OCR software, but I’ll be moving to a solution soon which the best OCR software cannot pass.
I’m also thinking about starting an open-source project to provide a similar solution for email. The idea is to move to a whitelist system, and senders who are not on the whitelist need to respond to a reverse turing test challenge. Such software is already available commercially for Outlook and Outlook Express, but I want to build a solution which can be invoked in procmail (similar to SpamAssassin) and which has a PHP or Perl web interface. I hope to get this off the ground within the next month.
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