the latest in spam technology
For some reason comment spam has dropped to near zero on my site. I don’t know whether to be happy or insulted. Meanwhile, on the email spam side of things, it appears that the popularity of Bayesian filtering has sent some spammers over the edge, to the point where they send out messages like this:
Online Phar?macpy
Save Over 50% On Y;omur P}rescsnriptio?n Druhvgs
With o/u|r online pharmacy you cOan saFve thousands oUf dolla|r8is
eiach Nye14ar on coXstl’y medicationjs.
WDe WsenCl>l almo!st aWXny mie3dica*tio{n yTtou w?o%ug1ld nee(d fDNrom
:Xanax )to Vi%codibqn.
No p*rescriN9ption Gis needed. B1So shop our pharmacy and staq6rt
saviQUng todaEy
This elevates spam filtering into a kind of CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Public Turing Test to Tell Computers and Humans Apart) [link], you must somehow read the obfuscated message to determine that it is spam.
Algorithm for constructing locked room puzzles
Just thinking out loud here, with no real context.
The player is confronted by a locked door. How does he open it?
A common construction for this puzzle is the paper-under-the-door skeleton key setup: the key is in the opposite side of the lock, and can be pushed out of the lock with a small pointed object, to land on a sheet of paper which can then be pulled back under the door. This is a slightly sophisticated puzzle, because it requires the interaction of three objects: the door, the small pointed object, and the flat object. (The key is not part of the interaction, it is the reward for solving the puzzle.)
Step 1: operate the flat object on the door
Step 2: operate the pointed object on the door
Step 3 (obvious): retrieve the flat object
Welcome to Recipro City
I must admit that I regularly scour the site logs to see who is linking to this, my blog.
- The Ludonauts collective
- Jurie Horneman’s Intelligent Artifice
- snooze (language unknown)
- William Huber’s zang.org
- Power Up – a blog related to the Power Up symposium from July 2003.
- Terra Nova – a collaborative weblog addressing virtual worlds
Hi, guys!
Not something I recommend
If you are happy with life, if you feel like the US is doing a bang-up job in Iraq, if you wish to remain content and unaware of what war is really all about, then I don’t recommend you spend an hour or two browsing through this extensive collection of photos from Iraq at CBS News.