From pgarland@u.washington.edu Mon Dec 30 19:23:42 2002 Received: from mxu2.u.washington.edu (mxu2.u.washington.edu [140.142.33.7]) by lists.u.washington.edu (8.12.1+UW01.12/8.12.1+UW02.12) with ESMTP id gBV3NfCK042770 for ; Mon, 30 Dec 2002 19:23:41 -0800 Received: from mxout2.cac.washington.edu (mxout2.cac.washington.edu [140.142.33.4]) by mxu2.u.washington.edu (8.12.1+UW01.12/8.12.1+UW02.12) with ESMTP id gBV3NeIP031278 (version=TLSv1/SSLv3 cipher=EDH-RSA-DES-CBC3-SHA bits=168 verify=NO) for ; Mon, 30 Dec 2002 19:23:40 -0800 Received: from mailscan-out2.cac.washington.edu (mailscan-out2.cac.washington.edu [140.142.33.17]) by mxout2.cac.washington.edu (8.12.1+UW01.12/8.12.1+UW02.12) with SMTP id gBV3Ne0M014384 for ; Mon, 30 Dec 2002 19:23:40 -0800 Received: FROM hymn09.u.washington.edu BY mailscan-out2.cac.washington.edu ; Mon Dec 30 19:23:40 2002 -0800 Received: from localhost (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by hymn09.u.washington.edu (8.12.1+UW01.12/8.12.1+UW02.12) with ESMTP id gBV3Nd5e019249 for ; Mon, 30 Dec 2002 19:23:40 -0800 Date: Mon, 30 Dec 2002 19:23:39 -0800 (PST) From: Phillip Garland To: UW Linux Group Subject: Re: Avoiding Spam [ was Re: list archive updates ] In-Reply-To: <7f500b97_1c67_11d7_8784_0030657ee746@atnet.net> Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; CHARSET=US-ASCII I've seen something like this done on a couple of web sites as a way of authenticating that whatever is filling out a form is a human being- e.g. show a GIF of a word then ask who/whatever is filling out the form to type in the word. I have to wonder though how soon it is before the spammers start investing in some sort of "OCR" to get text out of graphics. Then the anti-spammers will invent something smarter, and the spammers will find someway to get around this, and the arms race continues... ....until one side is forced to develop sentient software and the spammers realize they can expand their customer base by spamming the AIs... ~Phillip On Mon, 30 Dec 2002, Greg Stark wrote: > I once was a member of a list that had a list archive problem like > this=20= > > one... What we ended up doing was writing a Perl based html=20 > post-processor that found all email addresses in a group of text/html=20 > files, generating a png of the email address in a graphics format > then=20= > > inserting a link in place of the origional email address=20 > pointing at the folder containing all the files. It also addressed > the=20= > > problem of duplicate email addresses in the list and provided a good=20 > amount of security from those address harvesting spambots!!! > > - Greg > gdstark@mac.com > http://www.lument.com > > .