Last night (well till 7am this morning) I designed a new system called BotBlock that'll let anyone copy/paste a few lines of code to freely implement a fully functional CAPTCHA system. What the hell does that mean? Well basically you see, there's a LOT of form spamming going on these days. A lot of people have forms for comments/email on their site. Spammers have written software to automatically fill these forms with cheap spam advertisements. There's really no easy way to know if the form is filled by a Human or a computer.

Enter spamming-killing CAPTCHAs. These are softwares that you've probably seen if you ever tried to create a new Yahoo! account (scroll to bottom) or bought tickets from TicketMaster. The website shows you a picture of deformed text and you have to just type it in to a text box. The text is on a picture that is colored oddly or skewed so that no software can read it or recognize it - only human eyes. The bright folks at PARC also research this. So the technology always existed. What I did was make it VERY easy for anyone with basic PHP/HTML skills to use it on their site, without having to understand the whole science behind how to generate efficient images. Now, people can just go to my site, get a free username/password, copy/paste the few lines of code that generates the BotBlock image (via my server) and that's it :)

All I need is a few people to start using it and this could become very popular. You can see a demo for BotBlock here.

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