So Casey beat CAPTCHA with a little neural network hack.  His proof-of-concept was to hit some MVP blogs (he is also an MVP, a well-deserved one at that) with an automated comment spam that beat their CAPTCHA implementation.

And people are pissed.

I encourage you to read the article Casey posted.  It’s good.  His method was good. His point was proven.  His “comment spam” was a single comment that said what he did and linked his article.  His article explains why he did it.  Yet, instead of focusing on the brilliant hack, and subsequently the point of how to really fix comment spam, people are pissed at him. 

What the fuck.  People get over yourselves.  MVPs of all people should be looking at this from the point of view “heh…cool thing you did Casey, here’s what I’m going to write to beat your hack” or some similar sentiment…not be pissed at him for exploiting something like that.

CAPTCHA sucks.  In its current form.  The user experience, as Casey points out, is the worst.  You get a minute to enter the code…which is often not long enough to both read the post and comments and formulate your own reply.  I love when I post on Bill’s site and get smacked with Invalid Human Proof.  There’s one hell of a friendly error message.  And it’s not because you didn’t parse the CAPTCHA right, it’s because your time ran out.

I’m convinced the only good CAPTCHA for the purpose of blog spam is a natural language question system.  And the words could even be munged a bit to further fool computers.  You all remember that thing that went around that went something like:

It has been sohwn taht the hmuan brian can sitll parse lngauage poreprly wtih the lteters mxied up as lnog as the frist and lsat letetrs are in the porepr psoitoins.

So you can take the Turing test further by munging a few words in the question.

The user experience in this isn’t bad, except you have to make allowances for spelling and whatnot, but I think it’s better than CAPTCHA letter recognition.  Hell, half the time I don’t even know what the characters are, and last time I checked, I’m human.  What that says about my intelligence I’ll leave for you to decide.