everyday Turing testing

When receiving a link in an instant message, the best practice is to verify with the sender if the link was sent intentionally or not.

New IM worm chats with intended victims | CNET News.com

It's funny that they said that stock safety precaution, even though it's now insufficient. Perhaps what they meant was: Verify with the sender using a sufficiently difficult Turing test whether the link was sent intentionally.

I've tried Turing testing people who wrote to me out of the blue, and it's not easy. I would say, "Please write something in response to this that proves that you're a human being," and they'd say "OMG yeah ok." Maybe in the next few years, via just this sort of ridiculousness, the idea of Turing testing will bubble up into the mainstream.

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