In the war between spammers and everyone else, the spammers may have captured new territory. A new trojan appears to be capable of bypassing the CAPTCHA systems on Yahoo and Hotmail, allowing spammers to create 500 bogus email addresses per hour. CAPTCHA tests are the distorted images of text that computers have previously been unable to read. They’re a kind of simple Turing Test meant to require a human behind a keyboard when creating a new email address.
I am suspicious of the claim that the trojan is actually somehow able to read these images, which have thus far been impossible to crack as a security measure. New Scientist Blog agrees. 500 an hour is not very fast. There is some trickery at work here, perhaps in the form of passing the CAPTCHAs from Hotmail to another website where humans are doing the solving work for the spammers.
Past Futurismic contributorJay Lake has just published “Mainspring,” a novel about the gears of the universe, the Archangel Gabriel, and a clockmaker’s apprentice. I haven’t read it yet, but knowing Jay’s penchant for the inventive and his storyteller’s intuition, I’m sure I’ll like it. If you’ve read it, let us know what you think in the comments. [boingboing]
If there’s one thing that everyone (even the most enthusiastic) has to say about Second Life, it’s that the software is ferociously resource-hungry and more bug-ridden than a hobo’s sleeping bag. Numerous projects are running toward the goal of a more user-friendly interface based on open source code, and one of them has just become the darling of the SL blogosphere by creating an AJAX-based text-only version of the client software – in non-geek language, that means it can run in your web browser. Which is pretty good going for a fifteen year old.
