Tag: CAPTCHA

This couldn't have been planned any better. The morning after Zuckerberg's fan page was hacked, Facebook announced a pair of new security features to keep hackers at bay. The site can now be accessed entirely over an encrypted HTTPS connection. In addition, Facebook has introduced a "social authentication" feature that asks you to identify friends in photos, instead of making you struggle to ...

Your mom may be a compulsive Facebooker, but does that necessarily make her a spammer? According to Facebook's security system, it does. When the social network launched its new Groups feature a few weeks ago, many mothers, like Lucy Berry of Kansas, began using the tool to share parenting tips and stories between themselves. But because some of them posted so incessantly, Facebook ...

CAPTCHA. It's an unfortunate necessity in today's bot-infested Web. And, as the bots have gotten smarter, the tests meant to separate the people from the machines have only gotten harder to decipher. Companies are starting to look for a better way to weed out non-humans, and one, Solve Media, thinks it has a solution that advertisers will like. Instead of using those squiggly, distorted letters, ...

A few months ago, we told you about a growing wave of spammers who had begun outsourcing their CAPTCHA-solving duties to low-wage workers in developing countries. Now, a recently published study from UC San Diego has revealed just how insidious and exploitative this underground market really is. In the paper (PDF), which was presented at the recent USENIX Computer Symposium, researchers found that ...

CAPTCHA: the most irritating and unfortunate necessity of the Web. Spam bots have gotten smart enough to outwit most of the hoops put in place to keep them from flooding various sites with fake accounts. To stem the tide, CAPTCHAs have gotten increasingly difficult for the bots to decipher, which has the unfortunate side effect of leaving humans just as puzzled. While we're forced to pause, ...

As technology and globalization continue to break down economic barriers and more fully integrate national economies, finding cheap, affordable labor has become easier than ever. And spammers are no exception. According to the New York Times, spammers have begun paying workers in developing countries to solve Captchas, those ubiquitous tests that require site visitors to identify a series of fuzzy ...

The battle between malicious software makers and computer security companies has taken a new turn. Spammers have turned users against themselves and against the security firms trying to protect them. The latest security system to undergo assault by spammers is CAPTCHA, or "Completely Automated Public Turing Test to Tell Computers and Humans Apart." CAPTCHA displays a series of letters and ...