Idea: Human screenning

[Ole Tange]

On 1/15/07, Paul Bohme <openmoko at bohme.org> wrote:
> Dave Crossland wrote:
> > On 15/01/07, Gervais Mulongoy <gervais.mulongoy at gmail.com> wrote:
> >> Heh, until the phone spam operators start using basic voice
> >> recognition and
> >> to defeat the simple riddle :p
> >
> > Spammers don't do email address de-obfuscation because it takes too
> > much processing time; I can't see them doing this in practice :-)
>
> Unfortunately, with zombie bot-nets being what they are, spammers have
> essentially infinite CPU power at their disposal.  Whether the
> investment to get through a single obstinate node is worthwhile, look
> for any mechanism short of a pure white-list to be eventually overrun.

Could you elaborate on that?

To me it seems that if you can solve riddles then you are fairly close
to making a computer that passes the Turing test. Especially if the
riddles are not of the same form: "What is ten plus hundred?" "Enter
the last five digits of my phone number" "Enter yesterday's date"

First of all you need to solve speech to text. Then you need to parse
and understand the sentence. Both problems have proven to be really
hard problems. Throwing a botnet after this is not going to solve it
if the algorithm is simply not there.


/Ole