Tag: captcha

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Blogspot Madness

Matt suggests that “blogspot is no longer hurting america” because they’ve added captcha’s to the new blog creation forms. This is a good thing, but as someone who has been referer spammed by phony blogspot sites, I thought taking a random survey might be useful.

If you’ve not followed my “scientific methods” in the past, here’s how I typically do things:

  1. Go to Weblogs.Com for a list of “Recently Updated Weblogs.”
  2. Grab source of page.
  3. Do a bunch of funky regex stuff in jEdit.
  4. Do some math.
  5. Publish results.

The results of the findings? I found 842 weblogs in the list, of which 556 were blogspot sites.

I didn’t have time to check 556 blogspot sites, but some of the prefixes for .blogspot.com were like so:

  • kentucky-derby-entries-here
  • las-vegas-lawyer-info4u
  • medical-insurance-news
  • sales-training-resource
  • weight-loss-info
  • web-design-info4u

So now that Google/Blogger have made some steps to stem the tide, I hope the next step is to clean up the existing mess…

(In case you’re wondering, from the list of 842 sites, spaces.msn.com came in second with 60 sites, and LiveJournal clocked in with less than 10 in the list!)

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captcha that!

In captcha this! I mused about how you might use ASCII banner text as a captcha, well, them dang spammers must have been listening!

I submit to you an example of the spammy email I got recently. (I hope you’ve got a monospaced font installed.)

Clever! What will they try next?

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captcha this!

Some web sites use a ‘captcha’ which is a dynamically generated image with some code that must be input for you to post a comment. It’s a great idea, but oh, the accessibility of it all! What of people who can’t read that image? I mean, come on, haven’t we all dove into accessibility by now?

I have a solution, in the form of Text::Banner, and it goes something like this: 

#######  #####   #####  #       
#       #     # #     # #    #  
#       #             # #    #  
#####   #  ####  #####  #    #  
#       #     #       # ####### 
#       #     # #     #      #  
#        #####   #####       #

There! An accessible captcha ‘image’ as it were… it should even work in Lynx!

But wait, don’t like horizontal, try vertical! That’ll trip up those pesky spambots! 

#######
   #  #
   #  #
   #  #
   #  #
      #
      #
      
 ##### 
#     #
#     #
#  #  #
#  #  #
#  #  #
 ### # 
 
 #   # 
#  #  #
#  #  #
#  #  #
#  #  #
#  #  #
 ## ## 
 
  #####
  #    
  #    
  #    
  #    
###### 
  #

Urm… maybe not… I’ll work on it a bit more…