how i helped some spammer

i’ve been reading through old entries on behind the counter, a blog from someone who works weekends at a wal*mart customer service desk. in an old entry, the author links to another blog they started about their experiences dining out.

now that old blog appears to be abandoned — it redirects to another location which just has a captcha form on it, and the page title “confirm that you are a human being... too many artificial requests sorry.”

without giving it much thought, i dutifully typed in the text for the captcha image. and then was presented with another. looking at the source for the page, it looks like i have inadvertently verified that a particular hotmails.com email address is valid on some forum somewhere.

sorry!