Meet thine enemy....

Found this on a forum I frequent.

XRumer 5.0 Palladium | Blog about XRumer | Download XRumer here

XRumer is a software application that automatically posts your messages to forums, guestbooks, bulletin boards and catalogs of the links (as well as into livejournals and wiki). In a word it is an autosubmitter.

 

Not good.

 

Took the words right out of my mouth.

One of the forums I manage have already seen some posts like that. Looking like it was registered by a human (complete with a very small avatar) and typed out differently. Some even had siggys. But a semi-knowledgeable admin should be able to tell the difference between spam and genuinely unique posts.

People like that irritate me, but that's for another time. Right now, math homework FTL.

 

Shoulda been blogged at FAIL Blog: Pictures and Videos of Owned, Pwnd and Fail Moments

 

I wonder how its supposed to break the image verification? Where the person has to click on a certain image?

I do not see ReCapthca listed, unless I overlooked it.

 

Yeah, that part, I'm relieved about. I've always been a fan of using ReCaptcha instead of the normal captchas, since it's proven to deter spam accounts pretty well.

And I was wondering about the picture-clicking part myself. I find that kind of strange. :shrug:

 

xRummer has been around for ages, its fairly efficient and can also be a good way to get valid back links.

The only down side is the cost for a legit license.

 

So there is a legit use for this?

I was under the impression from their site this is Blackhat/Spammer type stuff.

 

Well thats who generally uses it but they use it to gain back links most of the time. And back links are good!

While, I'm not sure I'd call it black hat, I'd go with it rests on that fine line of grey!

 

xRumor has been around for 5 years now. It isn't new. They continually update it as people update their captchas. This is why I say that Captcha is a failed concept and communities need to move to content filtering and registry lookups for new users.

BotScout.com and StopForumSpam.com are your friends in the registry lookup business. Mollom, Typepad Anti-Spam, Akismet and custom filter lists are your friends in the Filtering portion of the protection scheme.

Captcha? It is a dead technology. Maybe not today but it is on its deathbed.

 

The words "legit" and "spamware" go together like oil and water.

That is like going to a burger place, and ordering a cheeseburger, fries and a large gasoline.

 

This is a pick up from another forum post, but what do you think of the news that Google bought Captcha?
Google Buys CAPTCHA Technology - News and Analysis by PC Magazine

 

Google's purchase is pretty much irrelevant. They didn't buy reCaptcha for the ability to stop spammers. They bought reCaptcha because they have the best OCR and book/newspaper scanning technologies in the world. It is just part of Google's plan to digitize all information and control its distribution worldwide. All for a small profit of course.