Wednesday, February 6, 2008

public landbot - cancelled

hmm appears the infamous public land bot got cancelled - reading the logs I can't help but point the immaturity of the developer, as well as the usual desire of the crowd to fingerpoint into someone until the wind starts blowing from the resulting hole.

On the other hand - the solution is very simple:

1) have LL install captcha to confirm that every land purchase is made by a human

2) have LL license the "automatic" access to the API for search/buy, making it additional source of revenue to them.


Instead of spitting poison on each other.Poor people...

4 comments:

A.T. said...

captchas are not that difficult to overcome, when it comes to profit - there are (relatively) inexpensive ways for that ;)

Dalien said...

You're talking about distributed Mechanized Turk approach, right ? :)

e.g. by putting the requirements to solve the captchas as an entry to the pr0n sites - like it was already reported.

(indeed, some captchas like blue text painted on black background, which is crossed by a red straight line as a means to "make it difficult" are not even worth mentioning as they can be solved programmatically quite easily - I was assuming something more sophisticated).

A.T. said...

yes, exactly - one major Russian email provider recently bumped into fact of spurious growth of created-by-scripts mailboxes for further use in spam: after study they found that captchas were merely forwarded/shown to solve to humans, in return with logins/passwords to porn sites :)

Dalien said...

This still requires some more infrastructure (and the possession of the passwords to pr0n sites - which already brings this into much more gray zone than before :)

It's easier to just phish then - without bothering with all this complicated machinery with landbots :-)