The Old Joel on Software Forum: Part 3 (of 5) - Mail Sending : Enter the word from image

Mail Sending : Enter the word from image

Hi,
This is something new that I saw with Yahoo.
In order to prevent the spamming from yahoo mails, or remove mailing from programs , yahoo has introduced the 'enter the word' as seen in the image when you send the mail.

It happened once to me today and Had never seen before.

Is it in practice from long time and has anyone seen it before?
How it will help to prevent spamming from third parties ?

artist
Thursday, October 9, 2003

It's been around for a few months.

It stops bots, that register loaads of email addresses automatically. It will slow down spammers a little, that's all.

Stephen Jones
Thursday, October 9, 2003

I know about that for registration purpose it has been around.
But this came when you actually send a mail.
I have same account for years and this is the first time I saw this..

Easy
Thursday, October 9, 2003

An increasing number of sites do this to reduce submissions by bots, because it's something that's hard for computers to do but relatively easy for humans. Google on "reverse Turing test" or "captcha" (a loose acronym for "Completely Automated Public Turing test to Tell Computers and Humans Apart") to learn more about it.

John C.
Thursday, October 9, 2003

I think I'm receiving all the emails in the world that don't for whatever reason arrive at their intended destination.

Simon Lucy
Thursday, October 9, 2003

That was interesting, the above was intended for the thread about mail being lost.

Oh well.

Simon Lucy
Thursday, October 9, 2003

Dear Simon,
Perhaps their senders, like you, get confused about the right address :)

Stephen Jones
Thursday, October 9, 2003

Once botspammers learn to decode wonkified text in image files, the next step is to do something harder, like, for example, a mathematical word problem.

Course, then, 60% of the world would then fail ...

But this could have some beneficial side effects, for example:

"You must be *this* tall to ride the Internet".

Alyosha`
Thursday, October 9, 2003

It should put up that banner ad where you have to whack the monkey with the hammer. I bet a computer couldn't do that!

Brian
Thursday, October 9, 2003

A program could easily whack a mole. I once worked with some QA guys would used Microsoft Visual Test to test GUI apps. They wrote a Visual Test script to play some web game that involved navigating a maze. In the game rankings, most people had 20-30 seconds. The top two slots (theirs) were sub-seconds times! :-)

runtime
Thursday, October 9, 2003

"It stops bots, that register loaads of email addresses automatically. "

It's supposed to but you can get around it if you think a little. It's much easier to get around it if the site just uses 10 numeric images and has you out in the number shown.

Tom Vu
Thursday, October 9, 2003

I've never paid attention, but if *I* were designing the system, I'd get a word from a dictionary list (10k entries), then render it into a gif/png, do the overlay grid and funhouse mirror stuff, and render to the browser.

img src is always the same, and an unknown list of words to try. Make it even harder - toss a two-digit number on the front or back.

Philo

Philo
Friday, October 10, 2003

Philo - that algorithm's already been cracked. See:

http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~mori/gimpy/gimpy.html

A program has been written that succeeds better than 80% of the time, with only a few seconds' processing time. :(

I suspect the next level of image CAPTCHAs will try to make use of humans' persistence of vision and shape/background filtering of moving objects, with animated .GIFs. If the word moves around on randomly changing background noise, and the word itself is made of noise, and moves against the background with a slightly lower rate of change...

Phillip J. Eby
Friday, October 10, 2003