braille? ----- Original Message ----- From: "Dan Eickmeier" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: "General discussions on all topics relating to the use of Mac OS X by theblind" <[email protected]> Sent: Wednesday, March 26, 2008 11:41 PM Subject: Re: What's the purpose of CAPTCHA anyways?
Hi Chris and all, Just to put my contribution in on this trhead. Sites that have put in audio captchas have definitely provided a good method for us to handle this. owever, I heard of a site that had one of these set up, and actually removed it asof late, so they justh ave a visual captcha. that being livejournal.com. DOn't know why they removed their audio captcha, but unfortunately they did. Dan Eickmeier, Brantford, ONtario Canada. Amateur radio station: va3ets EchoLink node number: 6165 MSN and email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Skype: va3ets On 26-Mar-08, at 10:49 PM, Chris Blouch wrote: > A 'simple' solution is to just supply an audio equivalent. Usually > these are made from several different voices reading the letters > over top of background noise to try and spoil the spammers. > Unfortunatley most web sites assume sighted mouse clickers and fail > to provide this alternative. If you would like to hear an example, > give AOL's a try here: > > https://new.aol.com/freeaolweb/ > > Go to the link chooser (VO-U) and follow the link that says "Can't > see this image?" which will pop a new window. In that window > activate the button that says "Play Audio". This will play an audio > version of the same captcha and drop you into the entry form field > so you can type it in. You don't have to actually fill anything else > out just to hear how this works. > > That said, the general purpose is to keep automated systems from > creating bogus accounts and using them to send piles of spam or > other bad behavior. The idea is to present some media that is hard > to visually or audibly decipher in hopes that only real humans could > get it right. Of course this is an arms race where the captcha > (audio or image) are trying to keep ahead of the OCR or voice > recognition algorithms. Ultimately this path will end in failure but > for the moment it seems to keep the wolves at bay. > > As to how to get other companies to do it right, I dunno. It takes a > lot of work to try and keep ahead of the race so I'm sure AOL, > Google and the like are not going to just give away their secret > systems for generating these things. By definition, if they open > sourced it that would give the spammers insight into how to crack > the system. So with no real sharing in order to support security by > obscurity companies are left trying to create their own systems or > buying them from somebody else, and those are the companies that > care. All the others are either ignorant or just hope the problem > will magically fix itself. Not gonna happen. > > Longer term I'm hoping for some of the Open ID stuff to get popular > so I can use an authentication system that works for me and not just > the system built into a particular web site. That still a bit off > into the future though. See > > http://openid.net/ > > CB > > UCLA Bruins Fan wrote: >> Can anyone tell me what the function of CAPTCHAS is supposed to >> be? Why are they needed on so many sites? Do they really perform >> any function other than making it difficult for blind users to >> access sites? >> Olivia >> >> >
