C'mon cletus give us a bit of credit. Are you telling us that a company with the World's Smartest Engineers(tm) doesn't already do exactly this with their custom front end machines? :-) It's one of the more entertaining new hire classes.
You are correct that perfection is not achievable and you don't even want to get so close that you get very many false positives. But honey pots are bandwidth, which for folks who pay for bandwidth as part of their infrastructure charge, its a burden they are loath to bear. Rather to simply toss the packets into the ether whence they came rather than bother waking up their EC-2 instance.
They sure love to use GWT with an indecipherable exchange format though, have tried to scrape a few things in adwords before. I'm sure it is possible but there was enough of a deterrent for me to not bother.
You are correct that perfection is not achievable and you don't even want to get so close that you get very many false positives. But honey pots are bandwidth, which for folks who pay for bandwidth as part of their infrastructure charge, its a burden they are loath to bear. Rather to simply toss the packets into the ether whence they came rather than bother waking up their EC-2 instance.