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aussie149
The Merovingian
Joined: Feb 12, 2005
Posts: 607
Location: Australia
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 Posted: Sat Nov 11, 2006 7:23 am Post subject: Completely Irrelevant but... |
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Grrr I am getting thoroughly sick of those sites which protect themselves by asking you to tap in a code shown onscreen in a little box, then do their best to disguise that code not only from automated incursions, but from mere mortals!
Some of these are so hard to read, you end up entering the code wrong time and again. There are a couple I have seen recently where I defy anyone with less than eagle eyesight to work out what is in there amidst the jumble of pseudo-letters and almost-numbers. or where a 1 looks llike an i, or a capital Z like a lower-case z, etc etc
Or is it just my aged eyesight? 
P |
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OPENSTEP
The One
Joined: May 25, 2003
Posts: 4752
Location: Santa Barbara, CA
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| Posted: Sat Nov 11, 2006 11:34 am Post subject: |
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I hear you on that. Those things are called captchas. There's even a rudimentary one here on trinity for logging in. Whil the one here is fairly simple, others are more complex. The actual reason is that hackers/spammers have gotten much smarter over the years and have figured out how to use OCR on those little captcha images to get the codes! While very cool, it sucks since now captcha designers start needing to make their images in such a way that they cannot be read by OCR routines incluidng using funky colors, shapes, etc. They tend to be rather illegible to me as well (depending on the algorithm) and they certainly aren't any kind of accessible either. Someday the holy grail of something that's easy for humans and difficult for computers will be found, but I've certainly not seen it yet 
ed |
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sardisson
Town Crier
Joined: Feb 01, 2004
Posts: 4588
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| Posted: Sat Nov 11, 2006 1:40 pm Post subject: |
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My favorite so far is the one blogspot uses for people who allow non-Blogger-account people to comment on their blogs; the word won't display unless you allow cookies from www.blogger.com, and there's no indication at all that it is the case... 
Smokey
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"[...] whether the duck drinks hot chocolate or coffee is irrelevant." -- ovvldc and sardisson in the NeoWiki |
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aussie149
The Merovingian
Joined: Feb 12, 2005
Posts: 607
Location: Australia
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| Posted: Sat Nov 11, 2006 8:21 pm Post subject: |
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| OPENSTEP wrote: | I hear you on that. Those things are called captchas. There's even a rudimentary one here on trinity for logging in. Whil the one here is fairly simple, others are more complex.
ed |
Thanks ed. I checked out that wiki. I got 2 major things out of it:
1. An acknowledgement that what I was complaining about is a real problem, and not just my aged eyes/brain:
"Even for perfectly sighted individuals, new generations of graphical CAPTCHAs, designed to overcome sophisticated recognition software, can be very hard or impossible to read."
2. The wiki page is half taken up with information and virtual how-to's about how you can defeat the catptchas!! Sheesh! What sort of guys are writing [those bits of] the wiki?
Peter |
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LemonAid
The Anomaly
Joined: Nov 21, 2005
Posts: 1285
Location: Witless Protection Program
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| Posted: Sun Nov 12, 2006 12:09 am Post subject: |
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Peter,
I'm with you on this. If I can't read the "secret code" I can't access the site. There are some sites I can't so I don't visit them. 
Philip ( STILL looking for his glasses!  ) |
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Samwise
Captain Naiobi
Joined: Apr 25, 2006
Posts: 2315
Location: Montpellier, France
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| Posted: Sun Nov 12, 2006 6:37 am Post subject: |
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This could be used to restrict the access to a website, making it available to hackers only  |
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