On Thu, Feb 21, 2002 at 08:28:13AM -0500, Damien Morton wrote:
On Wed, 20 Feb 2002, Damien Morton wrote:
I still think the email-address-as-jpeg solution is prohibitively expensive to reverse; effectively impossible for machines, entirely easy for people.
But it does have drawbacks.
It only works with graphical browsers.
This is true. We are in the 21st century now. Expecting a graphical client isnt such a huge leap of faith, unless we allow ourselves to be guided by recidivist or luddite lynx users and their ilk.
And Chuq says *I'm* arrogant. There are lots of people who run their graphical browsers with J/Jscript off for security and images off for the same reason (much faster browsing) that I use Lynx.
And see above about wireless browsers, and below about the blind.
And get the phuque over yourself.
It can't be enlarged for people that have poor vision.
This is true, for the public archives.
It can be reverse-engineered -- all they have to do is decode a single font, then they're all simple to snag.
Assuming you use a single font. Assuming you don't add some noise to the resulting image. Assuming you don't do some geometric distortion to the resulting image.
To reverse engineer, a harvester would have to examine pretty much every image it finds, OCR it with some fantastic military grade image recognition software, and see if theres an email address buried in there.
It doesn't matter, really.
As I said, "prohibitively expensive to reverse"
And just imaging -- yet another way to make 15 bytes into 15 kilobytes. Yeah, the network operators oughtta like that. You get a commission?
Replacing the email addresses with a link to a webform would be another, perfectly acceptable solution, assuming you can get over your own objections to web forms.
We seem to keep conflating the "admin mailto problem" with the "list member mailto problem"; they have fairly widely diverging solutions.
Could we please be a bit more cautious about that?
Cheers, -- jra
Jay R. Ashworth jra@baylink.com Member of the Technical Staff Baylink RFC 2100 The Suncoast Freenet The Things I Think Tampa Bay, Florida http://baylink.pitas.com +1 727 647 1274
"If you don't have a dream; how're you gonna have a dream come true?" -- Captain Sensible, The Damned (from South Pacific's "Happy Talk")