From pfelts@U.WASHINGTON.EDU Mon Dec 30 19:49:30 2002 Received: from mxu3.u.washington.edu (mxu3.u.washington.edu [140.142.32.133]) by lists.u.washington.edu (8.12.1+UW01.12/8.12.1+UW02.12) with ESMTP id gBV3nUCK044624 for ; Mon, 30 Dec 2002 19:49:30 -0800 Received: from cpimssmtpu05.email.msn.com (cpimssmtpu05.email.msn.com [207.46.181.81]) by mxu3.u.washington.edu (8.12.1+UW01.12/8.12.1+UW02.12) with ESMTP id gBV3nQRP009671 for ; Mon, 30 Dec 2002 19:49:28 -0800 Received: from [192.168.1.2] ([67.40.12.203]) by cpimssmtpu05.email.msn.com with Microsoft SMTPSVC(5.0.2195.4905); Mon, 30 Dec 2002 19:48:58 -0800 Date: Mon, 30 Dec 2002 19:50:35 -0800 Subject: Re: Avoiding Spam [ was Re: list archive updates ] From: Peter Felts To: Message-ID: In-Reply-To: Mime-version: 1.0 Content-type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII" Content-transfer-encoding: 7bit X-OriginalArrivalTime: 31 Dec 2002 03:48:58.0355 (UTC) FILETIME=[8C741C30:01C2B07F] I've seen those gifs before, but they're usually so blurry that no OCR software is able to read it. ----------- Peter Felts > From: Phillip Garland > Reply-To: linux@u.washington.edu > Date: Mon, 30 Dec 2002 19:23:39 -0800 (PST) > To: UW Linux Group > Subject: Re: Avoiding Spam [ was Re: list archive updates ] > > 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 >> >> > > > .