Stripping for Spam
Spammers have come up with an innovative way to get around those scrambled letters used to prevent automated registrations. They've turned the tables on using humans using computers to computers using human to solve a problem. Spammers get humans to write the scrambled letters and the human gets to see a character named Melissa undress.
Many computer criminals have been trying to crack these systems to get at the net-based resources, such as e-mail accounts or blogging tools, they are designed to protect."The free e-mail services, so far, have been extremely successful at using Captchas [Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart] to recognise a human being or an automatic program," said Raimund Genes, chief technology officer at Trend Micro.
The novel system for getting round Captchas uses images of a woman called "melissa" who invites victims to decipher the scrambled text. Entering the correct text produces another image and another chunk of scrambled text.
This is a great example of a problem that is too difficult for current AI methods and depends on "real" intelligence to solve. Humans are plugged into the workflow to solve the problem just as you'd add another service to a pipeline. The innovative spirit is alive and well with spammers.
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