Posted by Jochem Maas on 11/11/05 16:42

Richard Lynch wrote:
> On Thu, November 10, 2005 10:11 am, Jochem Maas wrote:
>
>><rant mode="troll" sarcasm="true" anger="+3" replies="duck">
>
> ...
>
>>or put another way - is there a good reason why the web should be any
>>less
>>discriminating than the rest of society.
>
>
> Yes.
>
> It's the WORLD WIDE WEB.

shucks, now your getting all pedantic. I really don't think that a few words
and well meant principles should be getting in the way of world-domination and/or
global-brainwashing aspirations of a couple of media-cartels. ;-)

>
> I mean, it's all very well to discriminate against those people way
> far away whom you will never see in the first place, but they're not
> any farther away any more, are they? :-^
> [tongue firmly planted in cheek, folks!]
>
> And if you are a large corporation, you very well may be subject to
> laws with significant risks attached ($$$) for not being accessible.
> Google for "Olympic Committee blind user Australia big fine" for more
> on that topic. That alone makes it worth considering.
>
> Probably the best reason not to use CAPTCHA is that it can already be
> bypassed by OCR in most cases by a determined person. (Google for it)
>
> That means that within a very short period of time, script kiddies and
> web-POST-spammers [*] will have OCR anti-CAPTCHA technology rolled
> into their tool-kits.
>
> Another very good reason is that even normal users have a not-so-good
> experience with the damn things. I've gotten way too many
> indecipherable images and had to click multiple times to get one that
> was usuable in a single session for some stupid forum post I wanted to
> contribute. Not my idea of a pleasant web-surfing experience.
> Certainly not something that makes me want to contribute more to that
> site.
>
> I slapped a CAPTCHA (bad, home-rolled) into a guestbook on a site that
> had been targetted and was getting hundreds of junk posts a day -- but
> it's not something I deploy as a matter of course. And I don't expect
> it to survive more than a year before I have to just get rid of the
> guestbook. (Assuming the client keeps the site up at all, which is
> under review.)
>
> * So, is there a term for the web moral-equivalent of "spammer"?
> Those link-farm visitors who clutter up your site. blammers, perhaps?
> (blog-spammers).

blammer just doesn't sound evil enough ;-).
for the rest, good stuff, as usual, Richard :-)

>

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