SKIMPY CAPTCHA ADDS AUDIO, AND A PROBLEM [or what I did over xmas weekend at the inlaws -- python/web/audio experts skip to the bottom and solve my problem please.]
Skimpy Gimpy CAPTCHA now supports WAVE audio output to help people with visual impairments answer Skimpy challenges. Read more, try it out, download it here: http://skimpygimpy.sourceforge.net Skimpy is a tool for generating HTML visual and WAVE audio representations for strings which people can understand but which web robots and other computer programs will have difficulty understanding. Skimpy is an example of a Captcha: an acronym for "Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart". The visual HTML Skimpy program skimpyGimpy.py and API (applications programmer interface) is implemented in a single self contained Python script (module). The input for Skimpy are words or phrases. The output of the program and API are strings containing HTML preformatted text. The preformatted text contains "ASCII art" representing the input phrase, which looks like somewhat sloppy handwriting on a speckled page, when viewed in an HTML browser. It is intended that it is easy for a human to read the word or phrase when rendered as HTML, but it is difficult for a program to extract the word or phrase automatically. The program uses a number of techniques to make the output difficult for a computer to interpret: curve interpolation, random rotation, random skew, random scale adjustment, "smearing", and addition of noise. In order to allow CAPTCHA tests that are usable by people with visual empairment, Skimpy also provides an audio implementation. The audio WAVE Skimpy program waveTools.py uses a compiled audio sample file waveIndex.zip. The input of the program are words or phrases and the output are the words or phrases spelled as individual spoken characters in an audio stream. It is intended that a human can understand the audio stream but a computer program will not be able to analyse the stream and extract the letters. To make the audio stream more difficult to automatically analyse (without making it unintelligible) the program randomly overlaps and stretches/shrinks the input samples, among other things. The Skimpy tools are far easier to install, use, and embed than other similar technologies. THE PROBLEM Unfortunately there is a problem with using Firefox and Quicktime with the Skimpy audio. If you save the audio to a temporary file and stream from there everything works fine, but if you try to stream directly from the CGI or mod-python module via HTTP Quicktime TRUNCATES THE AUDIO TO ABOUT 3 SECONDS. This ONLY happens under Firefox afaik -- IE, for example has no problems. Am I doing something wrong? Please inform. The skimpygimpy1.1 download has all the relevant source code if you'd like to have a look. Help! Thanks in advance. I'm leaving the bug demonstrated in my sample web scripts for now, but if no one comes up with a fix I will hack around it in a few days... probably... -- Aaron Watters === Later on, we'll perspire as we stare at the fire and face so afraid the bills left unpaid walking in a winter wonderland -- seen in "For Better or Worse" -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
