Re: [PHP] Re: Accessing Files Outside the Web Root

On 14-3-2013 17:43, Dale H. Cook wrote:
> At 11:20 AM 3/14/2013, Jim Giner wrote:
>
>> And use a captcha (which I personally can never read!) to keep the robots at bay.
>
> I dislike CAPTCHAs, and some bots are pretty good at beating them. I'm exploring alternatives that exploit the differences between the ways that bots deal with pages and the ways that humans deal with pages.
>

Captcha is not a specific system like the ones you're thinking of. Most 
people think of the unreadable scribbles which are made so incredibly 
hard to read that computers end up being better able to read them than 
humans (hey, that might be a good way of solving it! A reverse Turing 
test! Prove you're a computer, or be allowed to pass :p)

Anyway, there are more captcha systems around. Not just the text in an 
image one. A very specific captcha that I quite like is to have it ask a 
simple question. For instance "What is the capital of the UK?" Possible 
answers: [London, The color green, 27]. Or "Pick the option that 
represents a number: [Red, twelve, fire]". These very simple tasks 
require the computer/bot to correlate various types of information, 
which is very hard. For a human, this is very simple. It's simple, and 
very friendly to your guests. If you simply make 5 different questions, 
and have them rotate, I guarantee it will stop the bots for a very long 
time.

- Tul