[Mailman-Developers] Re: Opening up a few can o' worms here...

[Ka-Ping Yee]

On Tue, 30 Jul 2002, Chuq Von Rospach wrote:
> Yes, I have. Because I've seen how the spammers have moved up the technology
> curve when it suited their purposes.

Keep in mind that you are talking about technology that doesn't exist yet.
It's trivial to write harvesting software with more features for, say,
processing HTML -- but in the case of OCR, there's no curve to move up.

> You're depending on not being "the low hanging fruit", so to speak.

To some extent, yes, if you consider putting the fruit on an airplane
and flying over a medieval village to be "low-hanging fruit".  Sure,
they will get to that fruit before they reach the fruit on the moon.

But if we really get to the point where everyone has to use images to
communicate instead of text, i think that will mean SMTP is obsolete.

> > In the image case, there is no secret.  Nobody knows how to program a
> > computer to read as well as person can
>
> Have you seen what the off the shelf OCR systems like OmniPage do these
> days?

Yes -- the performance is awful.  And that's on ordinary printed text
that's supposed to be readable, not on text that has been intentionally
obfuscated.

> >> And I'll bet in most of those situations, you just made your web site
> >> none-ADA compliant. Which means it's a no-go for a lot of sites where
> >> accessibility is necessary.
>
> > That argument is a red herring.
>
> Not for sites requiring ADA compliance, it's not.

I'm going to stop here, since it is clear that you're not reading what
you're responding to.  Please go back and look at what i wrote.
And then please describe how your proposed alternative will display
e-mail addresses in a form readable by screen readers for the blind
and not by spammers.



-- ?!ng