Spam probably stands high on the annoyance list of many internet users and is responsible for 97% of the total e-mail send daily, according to Microsoft, costing the global economies over $50 billion in damages in 2005 alone.
One way spammers send out their massive campaign`s is through the abuse of unguarded internet forms like contact forms or newsletter subscription forms. Recently this website was suffering such an attack by a spammer who was trying to use the forms on this website to send out his unsolicited e-mails. Fortunately, our internet provider quickly notified us before the spammer could do any substantial damage to our website or reputation. But, to prevent any future abuse of our website by spammers, we have increased the security on our forms by adding a so-called CAPTCHA control. You have probably used these before when filling out a form on the web, they make you type in a word which is shown on the screen as an image (a task which only a human can do) to make sure you are not an automatic spam computer.
So far the technical bit, the nice thing is that by adding this security feature you are actually helping to digitize and preserve knowledge for future generations! The security words you need to type in when, e.g. subscribing to our newsletter, are used to verify the scanned text of old books, magazines and other material. You can read more about this project on the reCAPTCHA website.
