webrampage

Oh look what I found. Google’s CAPTCHA doesn’t work properly. Wait. Do you think I’m joking? Do you? Well I’m gonna prove it!

Okay head over to www.google.com/addurl and enter a random URL. But, don’t enter the CAPTCHA correctly. Just type something random there. What do you get? Well I get this message:

Thank you

Your site URL has been successfully added to our list of URLs to crawl. Please note that we do not add all submitted URLs to our index, and we cannot make any predictions or guarantees about when or if they will appear.

Can they not afford a decent programmer? Damn! What kind of lazy (and dumb) bastards are they hiring? See that’s why you shouldn’t treat your employees like a king. Don’t give them toys, free food and other luxuries. Make them work their ass off!

I’m sure this is how the conversation about the CAPTCHA over at Google went:

Manager (or whatever they call the guy): Are the captures working?

Programmer: Yes they are. I just finished making them yesterday. They are the best CAPTCHAs on the web.

Manager: Good! Google must have the best of everything! May I test it?

Programmer: Sure. Just enter the letters you see in the picture.

Manager: Good. It works perfect. You can go play with everyone now.

Dude you gotta try it the other way too! Enter a wrong CAPTCHA. Oh man, this is just hilarious. Well Google I work freelance and I’m free right now. Feel free to drop me an email. I can fix that for you guys. Ha! You wish. I was joking. I’m not helping you guys.

Okay spammers its your time to have some fun with the big G. Big G? What’s it stand for again? Gangsta? More like ghetto right now. Oh well. Let me know if you did anything big.

Update: I just tried to contact Matt Cutts, Google’s head of webspam by commenting on his blog. I just wanted to tell him about this and I found something interesting (once again!). Mr Cutts has built is own custom spam protection. It asked me what the sum of 10 + 6 and I entered 16. It said I was wrong. (Hmm the head of spam can’t build a working spam protection.)

Update again: Okay the spam protection finally worked and I could leave the comment on his blog. Well he deleted my comment. I guess he was too ashamed of his and Google’s epic failure at making a simple CAPTCHA.

Update #3: Matt Cutts is saying that they do this on purpose. But, when I asked him why they do this he didn’t have an answer. Very convincing I must say. I wonder if he’s just saying because he doesn’t want him and Google to look like a total loser. Hmm?

Sorry don’t mean to ruin it for them, but there are bots that can read and enter CAPTCHAs. So, people who make a mistake while entering the CAPTCHA is considered a bot? And their submission is just thrown away? And the bots that can correctly enter the CAPTCHA gets added to the list? What a brilliant idea!

I wonder if I’ll find the CAPTCHA working correctly if I go there next week (or when we all forget about this). I’m thinking yes.

Update #4: This was submitted to Digg and it was going pretty good. It was second in Industry New’s upcoming with most diggs. But, suddenly it just went poof! It got buried. How is that possible? Just like that? And it was only 1 bury that buried the whole story. Was it by a moderator?

Do you think Google contacted Digg and told them to make sure that this doesn’t go front page? Or is this some kind of Digg censorship? I’ve heard stories of Digg censoring things out. Oh and Google is also dropping me from SERPs. Do a Google search for webrampage and you’ll see. Coincidence?

OMG! Am I high or is there really CAPTCHAs all over Digg. Okay I have confirmed it, a people saw the CAPTCHAs too. Okay what’s going on?

What is Digg trying to do? Stop spammers? Well the only spammers I saw on Digg was those McCain or Obama supporting village idiots. Some guy commented on one of my submissions:

IF RON PAUL WOULD BE PRESIDENT, WE WOULDN’T NEED “HOW TO USE DIGG” GUIDES
RON PAUL 2012

Oh wait. Who’s Ron Paul again? I didn’t see him on the news or anything. Wait. WTF? I went to the profile of the retard who posted this and look what I found. He’s been spamming Digg about this Ron Paul guy. Seriously who the fuck is Ron Paul? Oh he was running for President.

You know what? I thank Digg. This was a smart move actually. Now idiots like him can’t post comments. They’ll be trying to figure out what they should enter. I bet most of those retards never even seen a CAPTCHA.

Man who’s idea was this? Kevin Rose? Ah who cares, but it was a brilliant one. Good bye <enter candidate’s name> “brigade” (that’s what they call those retards).

But, then I think about it and it makes me wonder if the activity on Digg is going to go down. Like people are pretty lazy and it takes a lot of effort to put in the CAPTCHA everytime you post a comment. I guess the people at Digg never thought of that. Or maybe the fat, lazy people will just quit using Digg. Not bad.

So, what do you think of this? Are you going to post comments and send mass shouts on Digg anymore or is it a lot of work for you? Are you thanking Digg for this or hating on them?

Update (3 hours later): Digg just realized that the activity was going to go down and the diggers were really pissed off. Now the good news is that they took off all the new CAPTCHAs. Thanks to my post (duh!).

Update (5 hours later): Sorry guys bad news. Digg is not taking the CAPTCHAs off. They are just testing it right now and that’s why it was a bit buggy. At the moment you can’t see them, but Digg will put them back eventually.

Did you hear about the OPML exploit on Feedburner that allows you to get a lot of subscribers? Sounds interesting, doesn’t it? Wondering how this works? Well you make an OPML file with your RSS feed’s link pasted a couple of thousand times and then export it to Netvibes.

FeedBurner used to count each one of the thousand lines as a new subscriber. And that’s how you could jump up to a few thousand subscribers within 24 hours. Not a very honest thing to do though. I wouldn’t put up a fake feed count because I’m serious about what I do and I respect my visitors/readers. Oh and here’s the post from the guys who found the exploit.

So, you wanna try this exploit? Well too bad. The exploit has been fixed. I tried it myself yesterday and it doesn’t work anymore (I did this to check if it has been fixed or not). The thing that is pretty amazing is that FeedBurner fixed it within a few hours. Now that’s fast. But, they should have made some kind of official statement saying that its been fixed. I guess this small exploit wasn’t very important for them.

Keep in mind that there are still many ways to fake the feed count. So, don’t count it as a blog’s success or failure. Try not to judge the blogger based upon that number. The more important thing is the quality of content.