Is publicly editing Wiki dreams over? Ward’s C2 has caved in to Wiki Spamming.
By Angsuman Chakraborty, Gaea News NetworkSaturday, April 23, 2005
Sometime back I posted (prophetically on hindsight) on Wiki Spam - A Disaster waiting to happen in this blog. Please refer to the article for an interesting discussion on the subject and potential solution space.
At that time Mike Cannon-Brookes of Atlassian commented and I quote:
As for the “disaster waiting to happen” - c2 gets attacked, wiped, deleted etc regularly, yet it is still around and still full of useful content - that is the best indication to me that it works
I replied back:
As I said it’s waiting to happen
It would be interesting to see how it copes against a script based distributed attack instead of few pain-in-the-neck humans.
The fact that it is safe today doesn’t in the least ensure that it will be safe tomorrow. In fact the same logic could’ve been used to say WTC is safe on 8/11.
Mike, if you are reading this, the disaster has happened. And all the kings men and all the kings horses (read Ward’s Wiki moderators) couldn’t handle the load of Wiki Spam. So Ward decided to shut down (for editing) C2 effectively to the world. It is now available to selected group of his favorite people based on IP addresses or so I have been informed. As far as I can see it is effectively closed to editing. And hence it ceases to be a Wiki.
Ward comments on apparent lack of editing in C2 at Wiki Is Dead. At this point it appears C2 is truly dead as a Wiki.
Long live C2! It was fun while it lasted.
The kicker is that you still get the edit form. However when you are trying to submit it asks you to type a code (CAPTCHA) which cannot be located anywhere. Apparently only few lucky people have access to the code.
BTW: I am surprised that someone as intelligent as Ward chose to restrict people based on IP ranges instead of using a image based CAPTCHA. I wish someone illuminates on the cause of this decision.
Tags: Fact, Say
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April 25, 2005: 3:02 pm
Hi Squeg, In this case he is using a CAPTCHA, only the code to it is restricted based on IP ranges. Most people do not see any code at all! Thanks for the links. I read that article. As you know CAPTCHA has usability issues with visually impaired. Also based on my experience with using even a simple CAPTCHA before on this site, nobody (spammers) was able to break it in 3-4 months I used it. Spam prevention is a moving target. It takes them time to adapt to a new technique. By that time we will improve our capabilities too Recently however I have decided to remove the CAPTCHA with WP 1.5 installation. I use a variety of techniques which has stopped comment spam, referrer spam and other forms of spams completely for the last three months. So yes, there are easier (to visually disabled users) alternative’s to CAPTCHA now. And I am all for it. The point of the article was that banning based on IP ranges is much more brain-dead scheme then CAPTCHA, which are anyways simple to implement. Cheers, |
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April 25, 2005: 10:26 am
crap… i messed up the last two links… here they are: https://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~mori/gimpy/gimpy.html |
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April 25, 2005: 10:24 am
I’ve read several articles on thwarting image based captcha. It’s quite possible to bypass them via script and many of the commonly used systems have already been bypassed. The techniques may or may not be wide-spread at this point, but honestly the spammers have more time/money to throw at this than the good guys. Here’s a couple of links on bypassing captcha with AI. https://www.mperfect.net/aiCaptcha/ Here’s one about using people to do it for you. Obviously, someone really has to want in to bother, but the AI tech IS available to the badguys. Someone’s always ready to build a better robot. Especially if it can make them a nice bit of change. |
angsuman