I've been so busy over the past weeks that I have done virtually no online reading. Asi es la vida. Well, this one was just too cool to pass up.

Spammers are now usings a new technique to circumvent the 'captchas,' the distorted text in graphics, that users must input to receive the free email account. The spammers have cracked the system by displaying the 'captchas' on free porn sites in real time. Since there are always a large number of people signing up for free porn, they do the work of decrypting the 'captchas' which is then replayed back into the spammers program to create a new email account. Who thought that porn could be a hacking technique! [Slashdot]

This reminds me of Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy where the planet Earth was really just a big computer program designed to answer a question (the answer was '42'). In this case, you employ horny web surfers as a kind of distributed computing system much like SETI@Home. In what other ways could you co-opt distributed human brain power to solve problems without the participants even knowing? What kinds of problems are amenable to this approach? 4:29:23 PM    comment []