2006 Nov 10 - Fri
Turing Test for Comment Submissions
People have designed various ways to prevent bots from successfully submitting web forms.
Perhaps the most common method is by using CAPTCHAs: common ones being those funny images
with characters
hidden in a disconcerting background. CAPTCHA is an acronym for 'Completely Automated
Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart'.
There appear to be a number of ways to defeat CAPTCHAs. But why bother implementing such
a scheme?
For the casual bot scanning the web, they may be tuned for bypassing CAPTCHAs. But what
if a site was to do something completely different? For example, David Wheeler's Comments & TrackBacks uses a simple arithmetic expression
to break an auto submission bot. So if every site out there did a variation on the theme,
auto-submissions could be prevented. On the other hand, if everyone did a little
arithmetic turing test, then we've come full circle with the bot being tuned to look for
such a simple test.
One side comment, Wheeler made his site, through a simple javascript, some how
better viewable with Firefox but less so with IE.
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