Who's Hoisted by Whose Petard?

Blogger now requires that new posts are passed through a captcha, where users must type in a series of displayed characters. Although this process does prevent the entry of blog posts by machines, it cannot distinguish legitimate human editors from sub-human sploggers who remain unabated in their effort to gridlock cyberspace with trash. When the typed 'captcha' characters aren't recognized or the mechanism is otherwise not functioning properly, as occasionally happens with Blogger and others, editors are effectively blocked from posting legitimate blogs by the very technology designed to protect them. The unfortunate corollary of mounting defenses against cyber-piracy is that otherwise healthy e-commerce must pollute itself with ever more sophisticated defense technologies in order to persist, just as the behavior of pirates on the high seas impeded an otherwise robust and growing shipping industry by necessitating ever more restrictive defensive measures. As with the use of chemotherapy, the hope is that the cancer will be thwarted before the patient is killed altogether.