In what I can only describe as a brilliant move, spammers have developed a way to slip around captcha tests. The tactic involves infecting your PC with a bit of malware (a common starting point for these things). The next time you open Internet Explorer, what seems like a casual game appears, consisting of a virtual stripper and a captcha image. Entering the matching text causes the pixel-stripper to do what they usually do. Each image nets an article of clothing. Simple and effective.

Spammers take this ‘decoded’ text, feed it into the appropriate system (this process is automated, of course) and proceed to get whatever they were looking for behind the captcha.

Note: Problems like this wouldn’t happen if you were running Linux, or Firefox.

Original source: BBC News

Where I heard it: Marketing Pilgrim

ShoeMoney announced a new site today: Below A Buck, a site that provides easy access to eBay listings currently below $1. The design is simple and fairly easy to navigate, and there are even some decent finds like this AMD Athlon 2500 (listing for $3.25 by the time I clicked on it).

It will be interesting to see how (if at all) this influences eBay listings. I can see sellers listing lower-cost items with starting prices below $1.00 to get indexed here, and drive more traffic to the auction.

So I come here to sign up and get an API key (because blog-spam as annoying as email spam, but methods of prevention are not as evolved). Turns out I (optionally) get a free blog with that. Pretty sweet deal, I suppose. Now if only I had some use for it…

It is entirely possible that I may do something with this.