On 10/30/06, Owen Densmore <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Holy cow! I hadn't any idea just how far folks had to go to protect > themselves! The fact that OCR doesn't help is quite surprising to > me. Good article, thanks.
Well, that's the whole idea, right? CAPTCHAs were invented with the intent that they are unreadable by even good OCR, thus not readily machine-translatable, thus decent assurance that a human, and not an automated process, is entering that comment or creating that free email account. So, rather than detecting and removing comment spam *after* they are created, you prevent them from being created in the first place. The good news in Atwood's article for me is that CAPTCHAs don't have to be so terribly obfuscated that they become illegible to humans, too. I've seen some really hard-to-read CAPTCHAs, and I'm hopeful that mroe focus is put on making tests that are *easy* for humans to read, but hard for computers...not hard for both, or worse, hard for humans but easy for computers! I imagine that the next-hardest thing will be CAPTCHAs that are animations, where all the letters don't appear in the frame at the same time, or in the correct order. ~~James __________ http://turtlezero.com ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
