Go to mainpage.

Pilot the SpamHammer Kiwi!

Hi! I hope everyone is doing alright.

Please excuse my absence this last few months, I've been paying attention to other projects lately, like fixing up my small scooter (I learnt how to change the piston rings and seals!!) and getting a pottery portfolio ready to send (I'm trying to get some gallery to exhibit it). Oh I also got a car! Cool stuff, it goes from 0-100 in 3 bussiness days.

But today we aren't talking about any of that, though I am really thinking about adding a "pictures" and "diy" section to this blog.

Today we are talking about CubaWiki!

For those who don't know some time ago some compsci students of the University of Buenos Aires (UBA) decided to host a mediawiki called "Cubawiki" to post study guides, previous semesters exams and general information. This wiki has become one of the most important sources of study material for the compsci career in UBA and, even though it is barely moderated, has been able to live an undisturbed life.

A kiwi is staring at a notebook's screen, they know this peace won't last.

On May 13th this changed with the creation of the user "PeggyElsey12116" who inmediately started creating wiki pages linking to nonsense blogs and polluting the site. And while it was pretty funny to see that most of the pages where for adult toys it was also extremely tiring to have another webpage sullied by AI assholes trying to get a quick buck by abusing LLMs. Talking about how to deal with our small corner of the internet, which is mantained solely by volunteer work and good faith, assaulted by AI SEO hooligans wasn't the greatest way to start the week.

Why we think it was AI Assholery

It has always been known that a captcha can and will be bypassed by bots ¡But! on cubawiki we use questions that every student should be able to answer as a captcha. This used to work wonderfully until recently.

We believe that our problem resided in yes/no questions that could be "interpreted" and questions about algorithms which could be answered by GPT.

In the picture you can see a Kiwi's head and GPT's logo. Both of them have a speech bubble and both speech bubbles have giberrish inside of them.

Changing the questions to teachers names and things of the sort managed to stop the spam :). If it was a human answering the questions and remembering the answers or if it was some vuln allowing to bypass the captcha this wouldn't have worked.

Also the articles submitted were very clearly AI generated...

So if anyone has trouble with questions captchas being bypassed in mediawiki, try to change up your questions to stuff that would not appear in the training data.

Big shoutout to WinnaZ who handled most of the stuff and was actually the one responsible for implementing this questions. She has been taking care of cubawiki for a while! and is a very cool and capable person.