OK, perhaps just a teensy tiny bit of sensationalism in the title there… it’s hardly SkyNet or HAL but this little snippet (courtesy of the beeb) made me initially think “grr spammers” then “interesting software/wetware mashup” before settling on the title of this post…

Assuming I’ve understood how it works properly, it goes like this:

1. You get a virus/trojan/adware/malware on your computer by some means (dowloading “interesting_screensaver.scr” off an email attachment perhaps)

2. This trojan runs a script which tries to create a dummy Yahoo! account for evil spam purposes, but gets blocked by the CAPTCHA

3. The script then pops up a picture of a stripper, along with the captcha it’s been given by Yahoo! and says it’ll give you another picture if you enter the code.

4. Being silly enough to get the trojan in the first place, you’ll enter the captcha which the script fires back to Yahoo! and bingo, a new spam email address is born from which more people are spammed with the virus and the cycle continues.

Now, not having been infected with one of these things I’ve no idea if the trojan fulfills its promise by showing the next picture, but if it did it’d ensure its already engaged user would continue to provide free CAPTCHA-breaking services…

So we have the human user enslaved by the promise of scantily clad women (instead of the classic “threat of extinction”) providing services for a malicious script in order for it to replicate itself throughout the web…

Tis’ but a short jump to human battery cells powering gigantic killer robots, no?

One of the trickier things about social skills is to get your message across.
One reason why people have difficulty with this is because they use more words than needed. As Lee Iacocca said “You can have brilliant ideas, but if you can’t get them across, your ideas won’t get you anywhere.

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It’s old but still good. Watch Dick deliver a compelling and dynamic introduction on Identity 2.0 and how the concept of digital identity is evolving.