CAPTCHAs — the technology used to stop spammers from using computers to sign up for email accounts and the like — are thoroughly broken; spammers and researchers are finding better and better ways to get computers to recognize the word-soup. Computerworld's Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols has a good feature on what happens now:
According to Nagle, waxing sarcastic, "Several commercial products are now available to overcome those little obstacles to bulk posting. A tool called CL Auto Posting Tool is one such product. It not only posts to Craigslist automatically, it has built-in strategies to overcome each Craigslist anti-spam mechanism." It's not the only one. There are, he added, "other desktop software products [such as] AdBomber and Ad Master. For spammers preferring a service-oriented approach, there's ItsYourPost." The result? "The defenses of Craigslist have been overrun. Some categories on Craigslist have become over 90 per cent spam. The personals sections were the first to go, then the services categories, and more recently, the job postings."
(via /.)
