It all started with my friend Sveder's blog and his seemingly random desire to reminisce on projects long gone and forgotten in the sea of long gone and forgotten github projects.
He was going on about CAPTCHA making and breaking when I, as is often the case, decided that I had something smart to say and began theorizing about the subject in a comment. As you may notice on his blog, it went on for a little while until I could no longer withstand the urge to challenge him to a duel of the bloodiest kind.
Now, a challenge of such epic proportions deserves some attention from both opponents and so I decided that it's time to revive my failing career as a blogger for the occasion.
I'm not promising anything regarding frequency, let alone quality, but I will do my utmost to make this blog worthy of your time.
Getting back to the matter of the challenge at hand:
Sveder is what one might call a "developer", you know, those people who attempt solve problems by means of code.
I, on the other hand, am a security researcher, one of those people nobody likes because we create problems. (but let's not start this blog with any pretense, we all know who gets to sit in the "cool kids" corner at the party.)
The challenge, however, seems to have taken a turn for the flipside and now it is upon me to come up with the anti-spam mechanism (based on my brilliant concept of "hiding") and it is up to Mr. Sveder to write the ever-so-malicious piece of code that will break it. The challenge shall thus be appropriately named:
Role Reversal: The Challenge
We're not sure exactly how to go about this yet, so far some ideas we've had are:
- Some sort of turn-based challenge: I make, he breaks.
- We'll perhaps use some point system throughout the challenge to help determine a winner.
- Maybe we'll get some friends and colleagues to help judge.
If you have any ideas for ways to go about this, by all means drop a comment.
All that's left to say is that one thing's for sure: When this is over, someone's gonna be buying me dinner.
