Just a word to the wise. We may all be entering the obscured and twisted words from those weird Captcha illustrations, like the one to the left, every time we send a message using Stumble-Mail. I suppose it is a logical step to take, given that spam is everywhere else on the planet, and the growth of the use of Captcha everywhere. Of course, this may all be mitigated by the recent news that spam-bots could read some Captcha-clues. The games of cat and mouse continue.

A couple of times yesterday, while sending Stumble-Mail messages to friends, I was asked to read the little Captcha obscured wavy-word illustrations and enter two words in a text box before the Stumble-Mail message could be sent. I would consider temporary hallucinations a possibility, but my SU friend Jaybol reported seeing the very same phenomenon. I believe that what we were seeing was a live test of the function by SU programmers.

We can only surmise that SU is suffering from Spambots, or that they are worried that they are about to be suffering from Spambots. We can see how it would be possible to register an account, then use a program to make friends and send spam to them. We don’t know how profitable this would be for the spammers, but I admit that I have never understood how there could be enough dim people on the planet to make any sort of spam profitable. That just goes to show you how wrong we can be.