back to the community.
That led me to start
working on Mollom.”
makes it easier for people to visit Mollom-
protected Websites. Mollom achieves this
feat by deploying other antispam techniques
first. For example, it uses a clever trick based
on JavaScript to hide form fields from human
view. People don’t see the form fields, but
spambots assume the form fields are visible
so they fill them out. When they do, their
submissions are blocked. This technique is
known as a honeypot.
TYPE THESE LETTERS,
THEN DO A BACKFLIP
As kids, most of us
probably never dreamed
that we would someday
be asked to prove to a
computer that we’re
human. Yet that’s what
the ubiquitous CAPTCHA
antispam solutions
accomplish with their
tedious challenge/
response tests. The dis-
torted backgrounds and
warped text provide a
problem easy enough for
most humans to solve, while impeding most
automated software. We dutifully squint at the
twisted letters and numbers and retype them.
Not only is it a nuisance to Website visitors; it’s
also discriminatory against visually impaired
people. And some spambots are becoming
smart enough to solve the CAPTCHA chal-
lenges by using advanced optical
character recognition techniques.
Mollom’s solution to spam
is unique in that it intelligently
combines three of the most effective defenses against unwanted
automated comments while
remaining mostly invisible to
legitimate site visitors and comment posters. Mollom only delivers a CAPTCHA challenge as a
last resort—for most cases, a
CAPTCHA is never shown, which
JAVA TECH
Buytaert and Mollom
team members break for
a quick lunch.
University defending his PhD thesis about
Java performance and improvements, his
defense committee included the father of the
Java programming language, James Gosling,
who was then senior vice president at Sun
Microsystems, and Michael Hind, a senior
IBM staff member for Java research.
Buytaert is best known as the founder and
project lead of the Drupal project, an open
source content management platform that
powers about 2 percent of all the Websites on
the internet. He has been using Drupal for his
personal blog for many years, and as his blog
became more popular over the years, spam
comments proliferated. “I was wasting time
manually removing unwanted content from
the site,” Buytaert says, “and I noticed a lot of
other people in the Drupal community with
the same problem. I saw an opportunity not
only to improve my situation, but also to give
ABOUT US
JAVA ON THE FRONT LINES
blocked more than half a
billion spam messages.
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