Dave Williss wrote: >----- Original Message ----- >From: "Gary Funck" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> >To: <[email protected]> >Sent: Sunday, April 16, 2006 6:34 PM >Subject: RE: [Mimedefang] Image validator/OCR SA plugin > > > > >>Martin wrote: >> >> >>>But problably the spammers >>>will soon change their tricks to different images which are more >>>difficult to read :-( >>> >>>http://antispam.imp.ch/patches/patch-ocrtext >>> >>> >>On this topic, Nick FitzGerald mentioned this article, >>http://www.jgc.org/blog/2006/01/do-spammers-fear-ocr.html >> >>Sunday, January 15, 2006 >>Do spammers fear OCR? >>Nick FitzGerald recently sent me two sample spams that seem to indicate >>that >>some spammers fear that using images in place of words isn't enough. >>They've >>started to obscure their messages to prevent optical character >>recognition. >> >> > >I'm afraid they'll start using OCR themselves. One common trick to allow a >web >site to have an email address humanly readable but not harvestable is to put >it >in an image. That may not be so safe any more :-( Of course, they'd have >to >scan an awful lot of images in the hopes of finding an email address in any >of them, so they may not find it worth the effort. > >
Good! That's all I can say. Fine! Putting stuff into bitmaps is a travesty, and makes websites (a) harder to search on automatically, but much more egregious is that (b) it limits their accessibility to people with vision impairment using text-to-speech browsers. A lot of web pages also don't seem to take into account .21 or .19 pitch LCD monitors (like the 2560x1600 monitor I'm staring at). Do you know how small a 7x9 font looks like on that monitor? It looks like lint. Putting images or explicit font sizes (like "use a 9 pixel high font here" instead of saying "use a 8 point font here [and let the browser scale it appropriately]" is idiotic). I'm glad SOME good has finally come of the travail of spammers (though I never thought I'd live to hear myself say it). Ok. End of rant. -Philip _______________________________________________ NOTE: If there is a disclaimer or other legal boilerplate in the above message, it is NULL AND VOID. You may ignore it. Visit http://www.mimedefang.org and http://www.roaringpenguin.com MIMEDefang mailing list [email protected] http://lists.roaringpenguin.com/mailman/listinfo/mimedefang
