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September 9, 2005

Web Site News - The Comment Spam Arms Race Continues

by Ferdinand T Cat

Yesterday the forces of evil found a way past our defenses again. We got the following comment, garnished with the URL of a phony medical site.

Intellectually drafted article. seems to grab attention at once.The writer has a good knowledge of the subject and makes reading interesting.

The Conservative Cat blog empire has all sorts of complicated parsing rules for distinguishing between real comments and spam, but this one still got through. So now Bruce has to tweak the rules again.

The problem is that this whole mess with open proxy logging and Bayesian equations and pattern matching is effectively an arms race in which the bad guys have all the advantages. For every rule we use to block the spam, there's a countermove that will get past it. What we REALLY need is a rule that says Delete all messages that look like they were written by a demented robot.

It's all Alan Turing's fault. I'm sorry to say this, because the man was a major player in the early development of computer science, but the Turing Test is killing us.

The goal of the Turing Test is to create a computer program that appears to converse like a human. This doesn't make sense to me because you already have several billion people who can converse like a human, so why would you want a machine to do it? Nonetheless, if you take any college-level course in computing theory or artificial intelligence they're going to tell you about this test and give you the completely misleading impression that getting a machine to pass the Turing Test is a worthwhile goal.

Don't believe them. We don't need the cream of our intellectual crop trying to solve this problem, because we have a million monkeys sitting at a million mail servers who are already doing it. The most important unsolved problem we face today is the Anti-Turing Test: BUILD A PROGRAM THAT CAN TELL WHEN IT'S TALKING TO A MACHINE!

I'm okay. I'm a cat. I can control myself. Calm down. That's better.

Respectfully submitted,

Ferdinand T. Cat


# At Fri 8:58 AM | Permalink | Trackback URI | Comments (6) | More Web Site News

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Oh, heck, let 'em comment. You don't like what they say, kill the comment


Posted by: don surber at September 9, 2005 11:40 AM

Honsetly, I have no problem with that. After all, it's Bruce who does the deleting. The problem is, the comments and trackbacks come in so fast it floods the server and we get a nasty EMAIL asking us to take our business elsewhere.


Posted by: Ferdy [TypeKey Profile Page] at September 9, 2005 12:37 PM

Ferd, I just tried to send a trackback ping to this post. Am I being filtered? Yikes!


Posted by: Sean Gleeson at September 10, 2005 8:45 PM

Actually, we don't have any trackback filtering. The configuration file points to a fake script, and the real script URL is listed below the article text. The idea is to fool the robotic pingers into going to the wrong place.


Posted by: Bruce the Human Pet at September 10, 2005 9:08 PM

My wife, who majored in Philosophy, says that your "anti-Turing test" would be more precisely called a "Turing anti-test."


Posted by: Sean Gleeson at September 11, 2005 10:07 AM

Your wife is probably correct, but she doesn't live here and doesn't have long, sharp claws, so I'm kind of reluctant to make the change.


Posted by: Bruce the Human Pet at September 12, 2005 7:04 PM

HTML is not allowed in comments; however, if you put in a raw URL (http://www.somewhere.com/page.html) it will automatically be converted to a link.. Also, it is likely your comment will not appear unless you refresh the page manually after posting it.

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