I was talking about the use of distorted text for the Captcha screening device in my cognitive class. A computer-literate student pointed out that a web bot would not find text, but a jpeg file. This brought up the question of why the text needs to be distorted at all. The bot won't be seeing a screen (we assume). Could it be that a bot would encounter pictures and run an optical character reader program? If not, it brings up the question of why the text even needs to be distorted. Simply putting text in a picture file would seem to be a major barrier. I know spammers put a lot of effort into their jobs, but reading non-distorted text seems like a big task.
The distorted text that a 5-year-old can read but a computer can't was brought up in the textbook, but I wondered if anyone knew how the web bots would actually try to read text in a picture. Rick Stevens Psychology Department University of Louisiana at Monroe [email protected] --- You are currently subscribed to tips as: [email protected]. To unsubscribe click here: http://fsulist.frostburg.edu/u?id=13090.68da6e6e5325aa33287ff385b70df5d5&n=T&l=tips&o=23340 or send a blank email to leave-23340-13090.68da6e6e5325aa33287ff385b70df...@fsulist.frostburg.edu
