> On Thu, Jan 8, 2015 at 2:21 PM, Keith Lofstrom <[email protected]> > wrote:
> > I'm lazy. I use an image. If I was less lazy, I would rotate > > the image 20 degrees, and decorate it with roses and garlands. > > This sounds like a good job for our unemployed slacker artist > > friends. I don't trust any reversable, deterministic algorithm, > > and my slacker friends are annoyingly non-deterministic. On Tue, Jan 20, 2015 at 11:50:09AM -0800, Tyrell Jentink wrote: > I'm looking at CSS pseudo elements; It seems like one should be able to put > the email address itself in your CSS rather than your HTML, and use the > ::after selector to inject the email address as content. The spambot writers aren't stupid - anything that a browser can render on a screen, their bots will read as rendered, not as obfuscated using CSS. Why write their own HTML parsers when they can simply refactor firefox source code to do the work? A pigeon is better at recognizing images than the most powerful computer and best imaging algoritms yet devised - brains are primarily image processors, and evolution produces clever hacks we do not yet understand. Talk to an honest AI researcher; symbolic cognition is easy compared to "understanding" a scene. We assume humans are smart because we can process symbols and a cat cannot, but our symbolic capabilities are a recent and minor evolutionary adaptation that overlays our unique social capabilities. This is hard for us borderline Asperger's types (strong on symbols, weak on social) to comprehend. So the bad guys cheat. They use your "captcha" as theirs, to get access to a porn image - a porn addict's image processing ability is more valuable than a few milliseconds of download time. Their bot uses the porn addict's response on the 3rd party website they hope to breach. If the breach is successful (verification takes milliseconds), the porn addict gets the porn. That is how the bad guys would decode my email image - IF enough people did it my way to justify creating the hack for email harvesting, and if the bad guys could figure out how to quickly authenticate the validity of an email address. Keith -- Keith Lofstrom [email protected] _______________________________________________ PLUG mailing list [email protected] http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug
