I actually thought some of the comments were funny. Especially the one about the crab in the shell! No idea why they thought it was related to QNX, but an insight into the mind of spammers nonetheless.
That particular snippet was posted four times if you ^F.
It's really interesting to see the current "state of the art" in terms of the types of bots that get past the particular CAPTCHA implementation this site uses.
It's a very rudimentary type of CAPTCHA, the kind that anything developed within the past 5 years would probably get past with at least 30% accuracy (logarithmically skyrocketing to >90% within the past ~2 years).
So the post quality is somewhat distributed across a spectrum - on one end, dumb CAPTCHA OCR/processing <=> "slightly better than Markov chain model replication", and at the other end, clearly more sophisticated systems that more easily pass the CAPTCHA and generate more interesting posts.
What's curious is that 90% of the comments are rudimentary. There are very few interesting spam posts. I'm trying to figure out what to make of this.
I'm picturing some majority of utterly outdated spambot infra, still out there, scanning the Web for WordPress/XSS-level stuff, and finding success on blogs like these... and that these old bots are the only systems of their kind out there, because all the spammers collectively gave up with reCAPTCHA and CloudFlare protecting almost all meaningful concerns, with moderation following not too far behind.
Kind of makes sense.
But it's really depressing to compare these old clunky bots that are kind of cute (in a way) to the upgraded versions - the current-era tech, that get past moderation... and effectively pass the Turing test :'(
ralferoo|1 year ago
exikyut|1 year ago
It's really interesting to see the current "state of the art" in terms of the types of bots that get past the particular CAPTCHA implementation this site uses.
It's a very rudimentary type of CAPTCHA, the kind that anything developed within the past 5 years would probably get past with at least 30% accuracy (logarithmically skyrocketing to >90% within the past ~2 years).
So the post quality is somewhat distributed across a spectrum - on one end, dumb CAPTCHA OCR/processing <=> "slightly better than Markov chain model replication", and at the other end, clearly more sophisticated systems that more easily pass the CAPTCHA and generate more interesting posts.
What's curious is that 90% of the comments are rudimentary. There are very few interesting spam posts. I'm trying to figure out what to make of this.
I'm picturing some majority of utterly outdated spambot infra, still out there, scanning the Web for WordPress/XSS-level stuff, and finding success on blogs like these... and that these old bots are the only systems of their kind out there, because all the spammers collectively gave up with reCAPTCHA and CloudFlare protecting almost all meaningful concerns, with moderation following not too far behind.
Kind of makes sense.
But it's really depressing to compare these old clunky bots that are kind of cute (in a way) to the upgraded versions - the current-era tech, that get past moderation... and effectively pass the Turing test :'(
0l|1 year ago
Jolter|1 year ago