15 Mar
2002
15 Mar
'02
8:29 a.m.
--- Douglas Quebbeman <dhquebbeman(a)theestopinalgroup.com> wrote:
> > Anyway, you get a page where the host system looks up the
> > actual e-mail address, then constructs a graphic image
> > ON THE FLY that is a "picture" of the poster's e-mail
> > address.
> >
> > Gonna take a hell of a bot to break through that...
>
> Not really. OCR algorithms are easily available I'm sure.
Have you seen the recent sign-on techniques for a Yahoo! account?
You have to type a password read from a distorted graphic. It's
different kinds of distortion. I can see how they might end up
getting slapped for being unfriendly to visually impared persons.
How's a text-to-speech thing going to tell you what's in the box
if it's intentionally made to be difficult to read.
I was thinking about a similar thing for my own webified classiccmp
archive (private, sorted, *culled* selection of articles with a
Perl front-end to display things topically for me)... use Perl and
the GD package to graphically obscure the e-mail addresses to protect
people on the list from spam (the other way would be to truncate the
names and just manually dig through the data for them if I personally
needed to write someone).
-ethan
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