I'm no programming expert, but common sense tells me that spammers are not a particularly intellegent lot. The reasoning being, that if they were, then they would be working on String theory or something. So, it defies all logic to do what Yahoo mail has been doing of late.
After you labour over a message and click send, you cannot rest easy. You don't get that oh-so-pleasing "your message is sent" page anymore. You get something which looks a lot like a nag-screen. It shows you a distorted jpeg (or gif?) of a word and then asks you to enter it. Quite a good idea to keep spammers out, it reckons.
I'm not disputing that this will keep spammers out. It surely will. But I am not so sure about the distortion. When the words are in an image format (jpg), the spammer will have to employ OCR or other edge detection techniques in order to enter the word automatically. If he has the time, resources and in the intellegence to conjure up a code to do that online, then his abilities could be better used in helping realize Einsiten's dream of unifying relativity and quantum mechanics.
So, for yahoo to use distorted alpabets in the jpeg, according to me is inexplicably stupid. Or we wonder, is Yahoo! in cahoots with eye doctors? I had to strain my eyes to no end in reading the "distorted" alphabets. Next time onwards, Yahoo will probably ask us to evaluate an integral analytically and enter the solution before it lets us send mail. Talk about pains in the rear.
After you labour over a message and click send, you cannot rest easy. You don't get that oh-so-pleasing "your message is sent" page anymore. You get something which looks a lot like a nag-screen. It shows you a distorted jpeg (or gif?) of a word and then asks you to enter it. Quite a good idea to keep spammers out, it reckons.
I'm not disputing that this will keep spammers out. It surely will. But I am not so sure about the distortion. When the words are in an image format (jpg), the spammer will have to employ OCR or other edge detection techniques in order to enter the word automatically. If he has the time, resources and in the intellegence to conjure up a code to do that online, then his abilities could be better used in helping realize Einsiten's dream of unifying relativity and quantum mechanics.
So, for yahoo to use distorted alpabets in the jpeg, according to me is inexplicably stupid. Or we wonder, is Yahoo! in cahoots with eye doctors? I had to strain my eyes to no end in reading the "distorted" alphabets. Next time onwards, Yahoo will probably ask us to evaluate an integral analytically and enter the solution before it lets us send mail. Talk about pains in the rear.
2 comments:
that was very funny.. that evaluating an integral thing... and the irony, I had to read one such distorted word before I could post this comment on ur blog
yahoo, or for that matter anything that uses this technique (blogger included) are actually intelligent...
suppose despite all this, there indeed is someone who has written a code to achieve the objective of spamming, they have definitely identified the next great scientist who can make Einstein's dream come true... all that needs to be done is to catch hold of that spammer and push him into String theory research.
How I wish I didn't have to manually enter the letters I see in the image below!!!! And it is fucking 8 letters long...
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