[Image-SIG] ImageFont on Linux? Was: Hard to OCR font

[Chris Cogdon]

On Apr 18, 2004, at 19:52, Marilyn Davis wrote:

>
> On Sun, 18 Apr 2004, Chuck Bass wrote:
>
>> It depends what you are trying to do.
>>
>> I've looked at what various sites do to prevent autoregistration and
>> they use a 'normal' font with a complex background and lines (and
>> other geometries) going through the data.  Typically the background
>> is much bigger than the text.  The 'complex' background is quite
>> random ususally, in some ways like b/w camoflauge.
>>
>> Try to register for a yahoo group to see thier method.
>
> Yes, Chuck, it's cool stuff.  I'm dying to try to do something.
>
> I'm going to use it to block mail, except from humans.  I'm tired of
> struggling with spam-filter schemes.

The problem is that the spammers have found a way around that kind of 
thing. Here's how:

The spammer sets up a free porn site, but to get access to the 
material, the visitor has to do one of those captcha things. However, 
its not the site generating the captcha, but the captcha of a DIFFERENT 
site, such as hotmail or any large scale email system. The human enters 
the letters, and then the program behind the scene uses that response 
to 'break through' the captcha system on the target site.

Ie, it's using the lure of free stuff to create a distributed 
captcha-breaking system, using humans as the processing power.

However, it'll probably work fine if you're doing something custom, 
since the spammers aren't going to do all the effort of screen scraping 
a site with low volume. However, that means you can do just about 
anything that requires a response, as long as you stay small. If you 
get big, or the software in use starts to become popular, then the ROI 
on writing custom code for your particular solution becomes attractive.

Its a fun project, though, so don't let the above stop you :)


-- 
    ("`-/")_.-'"``-._        Chris Cogdon <chris at cogdon.org>
     . . `; -._    )-;-,_`)
    (v_,)'  _  )`-.\  ``-'
   _.- _..-_/ / ((.'
((,.-'   ((,/   fL