The CAPTCHA arms race
CAPTCHAs... we have all seen them. CAPTCHA means Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart and is a family of techniques to make sure a user (typically on a website) is indeed a human being and not a program trying to act like one.
When you leave your comment on this blog you will be asked to type in two words which are displayed as distorted graphic. Most bulletin boards and free mail providers ask you to do the same before they allow you to create an account.
CAPTCHA 101
The reason behind is the same most of the time: Preventing SPAM. Spammers use forums, blog comments and contact forms to post their ads. They use bots (quite similar to the bots that update the search index on Google, Yahoo and all other search websites) to automate that process.
So the idea of CAPTCHAs is to present a task to a website visitor that is difficult to solve for a machine, but easy to solve for a human. The graphical CAPTCHA is the most commonly used one.
There are other CAPTCHA variants such as audio-based ones or image recognition based CAPTCHAs. I've even seen a simple math question as CAPTCHA.
Thank you all and a Happy New Year
I would like to thank all of you who visited my blog in December 2009 for their interest in what I have to say. Thanks for making the WebDevelopment Dominique Stender a success in such short amount of time. Over 900 human visitors and almost 11,000 page views per month not counting spiders and bots is a solid number for a blog that is less than two months old in my book.
I'm glad you like the topics and ideas I present here. I'll continue to give my very best in 2010 and I promise I have a couple of interesting topics already piled up.
A successful and prosperous year of 2010 to all of you!
Great Indian Developer Summit 2010
Title: Great Indian Developer Summit 2010
Location: Bangalore
Link out: Click here
Description: From the website:
Great Indian Developer Summit is the gold standard for India's software developer ecosystem for gaining exposure to and evaluating new projects, tools, services, platforms, languages, software and standards. Packed with premium knowledge, action plans and advise from been-there-done-it veterans, creators, and visionaries, the 2010 edition of Great Indian Developer Summit features focused sessions, case studies, workshops and power panels that will transform you into a force to reckon with. Featuring 3 co-located conferences: GIDS.NET, GIDS.Web, GIDS.Java and an exclusive day of in-depth tutorials - GIDS.Workshops.
At GIDS, you'll participate in hundreds of sessions encompassing the full range of Microsoft computing, Java, Agile, RIA, Rich Web, open source/standards, languages, frameworks and platforms, practical tutorials that deep dive into technical skill and best practices, inspirational keynote presentations, an Expo Hall featuring dozens of the latest projects and products activities, engaging networking events, and the interact with the best and brightest of speakers from around the world.
Start Date: 2010-04-20
Start Time: 08:00
End Date: 2010-04-23
End Time: 18:00
Web enabled custom fonts with cufón
A frequent issue in web development is the clients wish for individual fonts for this site. This ranges from the understandable desire to maximize the companys corporate image by using the corporate fonts to more or less useless eye candy such as in headlines and menus.
The solution that comes up by reflex is to use graphics, often auto generated. But keep in mind that graphics are meaningless for search engines. Your SEO suffers if you use graphical headlines (the most important bits of information as far as search engines are concerned).
The next solution is flash. Google is able to read flash, so your SEO might suffer not that much. But what about your visitors? Ok, Flash is installed on virtually any PC these days. But not on the iPhone. So do you care about your mobile visitors? I think you should.
Furthermore, I use the NoScript Firefox extension as a security measure to disable JavaScript and many other "dynamic" content such as Flash by default. So I won't see your Flash headlines - all I see is a nasty empty box with the NoScript logo. Don't think I'll enable Flash just to see your headlines. Chances are that I leave your site in favor of another one with similar content, without flash.
Welcome!
Hey! I'm glad you could make it.
Here I keep posting my latest experiences, but also technical oddities and curiosities as well as random thoughts and ramblings.
All of it will be related to the IT industry and me in it.
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