+ 0 - 0 | § ¶Meditations on spam
So I'm behind the scenes tweaking things to make the site a bit more spam-proof, and it caused me to meditate a bit about the existence of spam. Its existence implies its profitability, but its profitability is no doubt contingent on the fact that it doesn't really cost the spammers anything to do what they do (e.g. they're using viruses and such to hijack the computers of others for their own purposes).
The most remarkable aspect of spam is that the spammers are in a sense true researchers of artificial intelligence. We keep on trying to come up with more techniques to block them that mostly try to ensure the poster is truly a human, and the spammers keep on coming up with ways to feign humanity. It would be nice to somehow legitimize and leverage the "research" into cracking captchas that has been done in the name of spam.