From: Markus <markus@...>
Date: 2004-10-26T02:43:34+09:00
Subject: Re: Garden Spam

On Mon, 2004-10-25 at 10:27, Austin Ziegler wrote:
> 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. 

     Ah ha!  Here's an idea:

     Step one.  Define an internal plug-in interface, such that any
member of a pool of captchinos can be called upon in it's hour of need. 
When called, they must provide the text of a randomly generated
readable-text captcha challenge, and a function that will judge
attempted responses.  The interface could be dirt simple; in fact, this
paragraph is close to half way there.

     Step two: propose writing a captchino as the ruby quiz some week
(with the clear statement that this is the purpose).

     Step three: Collect the best of the submissions, & there you go.

     -- Markus