From: Austin Ziegler <halostatue@...>
Date: 2004-10-26T02:27:37+09:00
Subject: Re: Garden Spam

On Tue, 26 Oct 2004 00:54:57 +0900, trans.  (T. Onoma)
<transami@runbox.com> wrote:
> On Monday 25 October 2004 11:35 am, Jamis Buck wrote:
> | ASCII art will still suffer from accessibility issues, since a screen
> | reader will not be able to read the ASCII art in any intelligible way to
> | the user. :( However, it is an ingenious approach...I'm tempted to look
> | into that, JFTHOI.
> There is no way to do otherwise for a captcha system. How would a blind person
> every be able to use a captcha system?
> 
> And a poor man's captcha is hardly a defense at all.

That's not true.

The defence is in the wide variability available. Specifically, while
Jamis' instructions might be "type the following string in reverse:
foo" (where foo is randomly generated), my instructions might be "type
the first and last characters of the following string: foo".

Jamis can also change his captcha instructions and examination very
quickly and easily without unduly inconveniencing his users. If he
encrypts the captcha as a parameter using a key known only to his
installation, then it's not even something that is even visible to a
spammer, ultimately.

-austin
-- 
Austin Ziegler * halostatue@gmail.com
               * Alternate: austin@halostatue.ca
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