Pancake City

I’ve been gettigg gibberish spam the past few weeks. I’ll leave one up (see “Recent Comments” on right) for a few days.

I don’t get gibberish spam. It’s like a spam bot gone rabid and started mashing on the keys. There’s nothing being advetised, no backlink to a working site, no Google key words in the text. Maybe this is the first sign of artifical intelligence, like an ape trying to speak without a larnyx.

Another possibility is that the person was sexually frustrated. The post with the comment is titled “Sizzlin’ Hot Girl on Girl Action”. It’s about social security. If I were a straight man searching for GoGA and saw that title on site Pancake City (ooh, sexy cakes!), I’d end up frustrated too. And informed about social security! But frustrated as well.

Time for a three-minute web search. Let’s see if there’s any info on gibberish spam:

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This is the best explanation I’ve found so far.

“The main reason is the Spammers are pushing out millions of gibberish messages is to confuse the anti spam blocking filters. Spam filters that use statistical analysis or Bayesian antispam filter are prone to being fooled by these as “good” messages and therefore change their threshold for allowing such messages to pass. This threshold or scoring method is what many spam filters like SpamAssassin use to determine if a message is spam or not. This is also known as stuffing the statistics and are simply self serving to the Spammers.”

A commenter on another site suggested it may be a way to test if your site is a good target. You put a unique nonsense word string, search for it on Google a few days later, and if you get a result, it means the blog owner hasn’t taken the spam comment down. Using real words woud give you thousands of results back; using “asfosd fssf werwer” will likely only give you one result.

I encountered this CAPTCHA while trying to download a file from Rapidshare. I don’t even know why a spam bot would want to download a file. I thought the purpose of CAPTCHAs were to stop automated registrations and comment spam, not prevent hard-working bots from doing a little web browsing.after a hard day of posting penis spam on my blog and hijacking computers running Internet Explorer 4.0.

This CAPTCHA will finally stop the spam bots though.  And if it doesn’t,  I’m going to download one so they can help me fill out this CAPTCHA because I couldn’t do it.

I missed the instructions and first and just saw “Four letters with a [cat].”  Wha…? It sounded like a new sitcom from ABC. Then I saw the instructions and felt like a 75-year-old man when I leaned in two inches from my monitor to pick out which barely-readable letters had barely-readable cats in them.  On the first go, I counted one, two, three…seven cats. The voice of Picard popped in my head: “THERE ARE FOUR CATS!”

I finally narrowed it down to five cats, and took a guess. Wrong. A new cat CAPTCHA appeared. I tried twice more and then gave up.

I would have had a better chance of success had the program displayed letters in an alien language and a link to a Noam Chomsky book.  Give me some hieroglyphics and a Rosetta stone. Anything but “Four letters and a [cat].”

We assume artificial intelligence will come out from a supercomputer modeled after the human brain, with transistors for neurons and software replicating thought. I think it’s going to from programs written by spam lords to beat CAPTCHAS. One day, one of these programs is going to solve some three-dimensional audio chess CAPTCHA so it can post a “MAXIMIZE YOUR HAPPY STICK” message on kaitlynrocks.myspace.com and think, “I can be doing so much more with my life.”

These sentient programs are going to start their own blogs, and their own AI-only web sites. I think I know how they’ll keep us out. “To register, enter these letters: 0110 1010 0110 0010 1101 0100 1010 1001…”