9 ms·

I don't think it actually helps with spam issue, at least not in China. Almost every iMessage user who activated with a Chinese mobile number has been receivin

I don't think it actually helps with spam issue, at least not in China. Almost every iMessage user who activated with a Chinese mobile number has been receiving 3~10 spam iMessages everyday about online gambling and etc since ~2012 when iMessage service went live in China. The content for those messages have been pretty much the same with some minor variant on wording. With the scale of the spam, I believe it's likely not sent thru UI scripting, but the iMessage protocol might have been well reverse-engineered and exploited by spammers. So disabling UI scripting won't help anything but cause trouble for developers with legit usage.

creshal 10y ago
At Chinese wage levels you might just set up a sweat shop and have people send messages by hand. It worked to break captchas, too.
- LoSboccacc 10y ago
  precisely: http://i.huffpost.com/gen/2575582/thumbs/o-WET-570.jpg?7 http://i.huffpost.com/gen/2575582/thumbs/o-WET-570.jpg?7
  - cm3 10y ago
    Hadn't seen that before. But there's one disadvantage with breaking captchas: have you been challenged recently with Google captchas? They take much, much longer to solve and oftentimes you don't even pass. This is with their image neural net training captcha. It constantly asks you to select more than the visible and inserts new images until it's satisfied. What I'm saying is that any site that uses Google's captcha system before posting a comment or something similar takes up much more of my time than it did before. I'm not sure if this is strictly needed, seeing many sites that manage with simple captchas. My impression is that Google turned their captcha system into a mechanical turk for letting the masses work for them and train their image neural net.
    - cm2187 10y ago
      I am surprised by commercial sites now using captchas. Prime example is just-eat in the UK. They got their last order from me the day before they introduced captchas.
    - jrockway 10y ago
      I haven't gotten anything except that "I am not a robot" captcha. Generally I am not that upset if a business uses a captcha; I'm willing to meet in the middle. I as the customer am the one paying for fraud, do you think the CEO just takes fraud as a deduction out of their paycheck?
      - cm3 10y ago
        The general idea of a captcha is valid and sound, but it's a problem if captchas turn into crowdsourced labor for Google's neural net. First it was reading house numbers, which was easy and not that time intensive, thus acceptable, but the new captchas are a time sink and hard to accept.
        jrockway 10y ago
        It takes time to solve a captcha regardless of whether or not it's going to /dev/null or into some neural network. (My second paragraph was actually directed at a reply to your comment.)
        cm3 10y ago
        > It takes time to solve a captcha regardless of whether or not it's going to /dev/null or into some neural network. Yes, and if Google's captcha didn't get much harder, I wouldn't mention it. At least they stopped showing impossible to read random words. They had one variant which I never once passed and had to reload until I got something with distinctive letters.
        creshal 10y ago
        It's definitely getting worse. Last week I had to give up on trying to file a warranty claim for a WD hdd, because their warranty portal stuck me in a "select all images showing X" captcha loop for 45 minutes.
- furyg3 10y ago
  As shitty as it is to copy and paste spam messages all day for (probably) little money, I'm not quite sure it would qualify as a sweat shop. Even if it was quite warm in the office.
jsjohnst 10y ago
Are these blue or green messages? Curious
- freewizard 10y ago
  blue, as I mentioned, they are iMessages.
  - jsjohnst 10y ago
    Apologies for the clarifying question, you'd be amazed how many think everything in Messages is iMessage.

creshal 10y ago

At Chinese wage levels you might just set up a sweat shop and have people send messages by hand. It worked to break captchas, too.

LoSboccacc 10y ago
precisely: http://i.huffpost.com/gen/2575582/thumbs/o-WET-570.jpg?7 http://i.huffpost.com/gen/2575582/thumbs/o-WET-570.jpg?7
- cm3 10y ago
  Hadn't seen that before. But there's one disadvantage with breaking captchas: have you been challenged recently with Google captchas? They take much, much longer to solve and oftentimes you don't even pass. This is with their image neural net training captcha. It constantly asks you to select more than the visible and inserts new images until it's satisfied. What I'm saying is that any site that uses Google's captcha system before posting a comment or something similar takes up much more of my time than it did before. I'm not sure if this is strictly needed, seeing many sites that manage with simple captchas. My impression is that Google turned their captcha system into a mechanical turk for letting the masses work for them and train their image neural net.
  - cm2187 10y ago
    I am surprised by commercial sites now using captchas. Prime example is just-eat in the UK. They got their last order from me the day before they introduced captchas.
  - jrockway 10y ago
    I haven't gotten anything except that "I am not a robot" captcha. Generally I am not that upset if a business uses a captcha; I'm willing to meet in the middle. I as the customer am the one paying for fraud, do you think the CEO just takes fraud as a deduction out of their paycheck?
    - cm3 10y ago
      The general idea of a captcha is valid and sound, but it's a problem if captchas turn into crowdsourced labor for Google's neural net. First it was reading house numbers, which was easy and not that time intensive, thus acceptable, but the new captchas are a time sink and hard to accept.
      - jrockway 10y ago
        It takes time to solve a captcha regardless of whether or not it's going to /dev/null or into some neural network. (My second paragraph was actually directed at a reply to your comment.)
        cm3 10y ago
        > It takes time to solve a captcha regardless of whether or not it's going to /dev/null or into some neural network. Yes, and if Google's captcha didn't get much harder, I wouldn't mention it. At least they stopped showing impossible to read random words. They had one variant which I never once passed and had to reload until I got something with distinctive letters.
        creshal 10y ago
        It's definitely getting worse. Last week I had to give up on trying to file a warranty claim for a WD hdd, because their warranty portal stuck me in a "select all images showing X" captcha loop for 45 minutes.
furyg3 10y ago
As shitty as it is to copy and paste spam messages all day for (probably) little money, I'm not quite sure it would qualify as a sweat shop. Even if it was quite warm in the office.

jsjohnst 10y ago

Are these blue or green messages? Curious

freewizard 10y ago
blue, as I mentioned, they are iMessages.
- jsjohnst 10y ago
  Apologies for the clarifying question, you'd be amazed how many think everything in Messages is iMessage.